


Only Dream Forever

by aslightstep



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: "No More Tony Stark", Angst, Character Death, Gen, Mental Breakdown, Wanda critical, Wanda's Grab-bag of Powers, and Wanda Friendly, apocalypse how, combined with time travel, imagine House of M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-18
Updated: 2017-03-03
Packaged: 2018-09-09 18:43:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 33,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8907697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aslightstep/pseuds/aslightstep
Summary: "I have an equation. In the eight years since Mr. Stark announced himself as Iron Man, the number of known enhanced person has grown exponentially. And, during the same time period, the number of potentially world-ending events has risen at a commensurate rate."
  
  "You're saying it's our fault?"
  
  "I'm saying there may be a causality."
In the wake of civil war, Wanda makes a wish.





	1. Never Want To Live Again

**Author's Note:**

> Title (kinda) comes from Alexander Dumas' _The Count of Monte Cristo_ :
> 
> “When you compare the sorrows of real life to the pleasures of the imaginary one, you will never want to live again, only to dream forever.”
> 
> Dedicated to nostalgicatsea, who helped me get this hell child of a fic done. 
> 
> As the the fic itself, and I really want you guys to read this: I don't hate Wanda, but I do find her character development severely lacking in the MCU. As in the comic this very loosely takes its idea from, in the beginning of the story **Wanda suffers a mental breakdown. She will be existing within this breakdown for most of the story. If that triggers or just rubs you the wrong way, this story is not for you.**

Wanda was hardly aware of it when Steve came for her and the others.

Time in the Raft moved strangely for Wanda.

(Is that what that place was called? She heard the soldiers on the plane that took them away from the airport whisper it, but she was distracted, craning her head so she could watch Vision drift towards Rhodes' fallen body out of the window. _He let me go_ , she had thought, horrified and betrayed, _he handed me over like it was nothing_. He had not fought for her. And she wanted in her heart to blame him, but when she remembered the twenty stories of dirt and concrete she had put him through, she supposed that perhaps Vision was tired of fighting. Of fighting her. Of fighting _for_ her.)

Time in the Raft moved strangely for Wanda.

(She never wanted to go so far. Why could no one ever understand that? She just wanted to be free. She wanted the choice. She wanted to see her future and make it so, and it had been denied to her at every turn. Fighting for it - that didn't make her bad. She wasn't bad. She _wasn't_.)

Time in the Raft moved strangely for-

"Wanda?"

Clint was approaching her, hands up, the door to her cell miraculously open, and beyond that stood Steve and Sam and the man with those strange shrinking powers - Scott? She didn't know how it happened, hadn't seen Steve arrive. She didn't know how long she'd been here, time moved so strangely-

"Wanda, I'm gonna take the straps off, kay? We're gonna get you out of here."

"This is - barbaric," Steve said, sounding very far away. "I warned Tony, I _told_ him-"

**_Stark._ **

Her powers react to the name, try to reach out to the threat and destroy it like he deserved, and just as the sparks leapt to escape her fingertips a wall slammed down in her mind and prevented their escape. Wanda heard a low keening noise and only after Clint put a finger to his lips did she realize it was her.

"What is that?" Steve whispered.

"Power inhibitor would be my guess," Sam responded lowly. Steve cursed and his voice grew dark. "Why wouldn't they? She'd tear this place apart within five minutes otherwise."

They were scared of her. Just like everybody else. They saw her as a weapon.

(She didn't deserve this, she had never deserved any of what happened to her. Children lost their parents every day, and that was a cold truth Wanda had learned to accept, but after that wasn't she entitled to something better?

Not for her. No, not for her, not for Wanda, not for the _Witch_ , she lost everything. They were stolen from her. Taken by a Merchant to be parceled off to others at his leisure.)

"Stark's not here, Wanda," Clint said reassuringly; she must have muttered his name. The archer worked on her straps as he kept talking. "He's not going bother us for a long time, I can guaran-damn-tee you that."

"We'll need him," the Captain said quietly.

Clint snarled a "not now" over his shoulder and threw the straps off to the side, helping her to her feet. "We'll get the inhibitor off once we're out of range, alright? It's bound to set off some kind of alarm if we do it here, and with our luck it'll be the one that Steve forgot to break."

"Where will we go," she whispered. "That they won't find us?" Her body didn't feel like her own; she could barely stand up inside Clint's grip.

Steve stepped forward, holding his hands up and out imploringly but she didn't know what he wanted. She didn't know what she could give him anymore.

(Wasn't she owed? Hadn't she paid? She had given her sorrows, and got nothing but misery in return. She couldn't stand this bargain, or all the ways she had been cheated. The Merchant. _**Stark**_. She was owed, _she was owed_ -)

Steve swept her up in his arms, manouevering her until she was draped over his back.

"Where's your shield?" Scott asked.

Steve shuddered, and Wanda longed to curl out a red tendril to feel the sorrow in that small movement. "Gone."

"Where's Barnes?" Clint added.

"Later," Steve said, in the exact same tone. So they had all been cheated, then.

They were all owed.

Steve spirited them away on a jet, and Clint found the inhibitor couldn't be removed without technical expertise and medical equipment on hand in case of a feedback discharge. "Don't worry, Wanda," someone promised her. She might have laughed. She might not have stopped.

* * *

Wakanda might have been beautiful. She didn't noticed. T'Challa confined them to one of his family's homes in the country until the 'situation with the Accords could be resolved.' Every morning Steve watched the previous nights' news before heading off to visit James Buchanan Barnes where he lay resting in the facility just up the mountain, taking Wanda with him so the scientists there could work on her collar. _Almost free_ , they told her, and she had fought not to cry at the word.

Every morning they heard Stark's voice echo throughout the living room. Clint was always sure to leave the house then, but Wanda curled in a little corner and watched as Stark spun a story for the world about a world without fear.

"Yeah, they broke out," he said flippantly to one reporter. "I don't know how. They're Avengers. I don't know if you were there for the whole New York invasion, but we're pretty good at problem-solving." And all the other men and women laughed at the reporter's foolish question, the camera gleefully lingering on her embarrassed blush. "Bigger picture is: they're out there. No, they're not gonna hurt you. I can tell you, first-hand, that Captain America? _Literally_ wouldn't hurt a fly." Another laugh and a flinch from Steve. Stark grows serious, gazing straight into the camera. "I know they're wanted men and women, I know that Leipzig has made everybody nervous. I know there's a lot of worry out there, and a lot of misinformation, too. But for some reason, you guys have been listening to me for years so I'll tell you straight, one more time: we need the Avengers. So if you see Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, Clint Barton, or Wanda Maximoff, let them know there's a fair trial waiting for them back in civilization. Scout's honor. Nah-ah, before you say it! I was totally a scout! See?" He did some strange gesture with his fingers and Steve turned the television off, reaching to his pocket to thumb at the mobile phone he has recently acquired. 

Stark got to live on. Stark got to smile and make jokes. It wasn't fair. It rings all around her head. It wasn't _fair_.  

What did he owe? What has he paid that they haven't? Or did he pay in their lives? Is that still his currency, even for all his protests of change?

Why did he get to live when the world would be better if he didn't? There had to be a balance. An eye for an eye. This was the rule. It had been carved on Wanda's soul since the Sokovian freedom fighters dug her and her brother out of the rubble of their home. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. Stark had sacrificed the world to gain every inch of what he had. 

Stark had never known the difference between saving the world and destroying it.

 _Almost free_ , the scientists told her again. Almost there.

* * *

The collar came off, and the scientists warned her in might be hours before her powers returned as the field the inhibitor produced wore all the way off. They held a little party for her at the bungalow as they waited, tiny cheese wheels and some Wakandan delicacy involving squid. 

"Didn't I promise you?" Clint asked her, drunk and smiling because of it. He never smiled otherwise. "This is just the start, kid, okay? Things are gonna get better."

She nodded, slipped out from underneath his arm, and moved to sit beside Steve on the couch, slightly away from the action of Sam and Scott playing air hockey. He smiled tiredly at her. "Any second now, you think?" he asked, gesturing at her fingers.

She tilted her head at him. "You wouldn't mind?" He looked confused, and she raised her hand. "My powers."

"No," Steve said, almost aghast. "Your powers are a part of you, Wanda. I know the world - hell, life - has been tough on you, especially lately, but you have the opportunity to make a difference that no one else has."

"Not even you?"

"Nope. No one can do what you can, Wanda." His voice was so warm. "Don't doubt yourself now."

No one could do what she can. No one had done what she must. An eye for an eye, this was the rule. Stark had bargained with her life. He had taken _everything_ from her, her parents, her brother, her friends, and he paid with her happiness. Her future! If no one was listening out there, if no one would give him his dues-

Red sparked at her fingertips.

-then she would claim them for herself.

* * *

"No more," she said, and Steve's brow furrowed. 

"Wanda?" He asked, a hand reaching out. Tendrils of chaos sprung out to meet him, swallow him whole, and he tried to shake them off, eyes going wide and scared. "Wanda!" 

_Don't doubt yourself now._

"No more blood," she seethed. "No more loss. No more fighting. No more of _this_." The world cracked, and the universe spilled out at the fissures, showing its parts for her to play with. They didn't need it anymore. She could make it better. Didn't she have power? Didn't they all fear her; the monster under their beds, while the real one was right in front of them, selling fairy tales? _We're Avengers - good at problem-solving,_ that's what he said. She would fix this herself.

An eye for an eye, a life for a life, time wasted for time to spend. One could only be paid in the other.

"No more monsters," she wished, and the world went scarlet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So lemme get into this just a bit: I think that Wanda, because she was orphaned so early and because she only really ever had Pietro around, both never learned how to properly deal with things and was constantly surrounded by an echo chamber for her own worst emotions. In the movie Age of Ultron, the twins show signs of not being normally socialized and not understanding emotional cues (when they aren't outright and maliciously ignoring them, which they do.) Part of this is down to the twins being very self-centered, but I imagine part of it is also down to them only ever having themselves after the age of ten.
> 
> This fic is multi-chaptered but a good chunk of it is already written, so expect one chapter per day.


	2. For All Evils

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wanda is four when she first has the dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place from when Wanda is four to when she is ten.

_“For all evils there are two remedies - time and silence.”_

* * *

Wanda is four when she first has the dream.

Her life is confusing. There are so many thoughts and pictures inside her head that often she feels as if her head is about to explode. Her brother says that twins are supposed to split a mind but that God wasn't watching when they were born and it all went to Wanda. Pietro always smiles when he says this but she knows in her heart that it is the wrong smile, even though it is the only smile her brother has ever given her.

It is not the only smile she remembers. But then, she remembers all kinds of Pietros. Tall ones, fast ones, grown ones, dead ones. She thinks sometimes they must all be real. They all _were_ real. But then Wanda changed it. Wanda made it better.

She knows she is different. And not just from her brother, who moves too slowly, or from the other children, but from herself. Who she was before. She doesn't know when _before_ was - she can't quite sort everything in her head. But she can move things with her mind, and her fingers spit red sparks when she concentrates. Wanda can do all kinds of things; Wanda can do whatever she wants. _This is my world now_ , she thinks to herself sometimes in a voice that sounds like her own, distorted through time.

But the world she wakes up on when she has the dream for the first time is not her own.

She wakes on a tiny rock, floating out in space. In the distance the earth is burning. It's familiar, like she's been here a thousand times, but she doesn't dwell, for she is not alone here. There is a man on the rock, watching it all happen, sitting on a jutting ledge with a suit of red and gold metal by his side, falling near to pieces.  

She gets to her feet and clambers to where he sits as quietly as she can. Out in space there are ships exploding, igniting for a brief second before being swallowed up by the darkness, but there is no noise. It's quiet here. Lonely.

This man belongs here, she thinks viciously.

He catches her when she is only three feet away and is up on his feet in an instant, hand outstretched with the palm facing towards her in a gesture that sparks a glimmer of fear and anger in her mind. "You're not real," she tells him.

"God, I hope not," he responds, edging away from the cliff. "Who are you?"

"You don't exist."

"Okay, that one is a bit debatable. I'm damn sure I'll exist whenever I wake the fuck up." The man's eyes narrow. "See, this is a dream, kid. _My_ dream, actually. Earth on fire? Not real. And neither are you. So, Subconcious? Personification of My Guilt? Whatever you are, please, for the love of Sigmund Freud, _go away_."

"No," Wanda says. "This isn't a dream. It's a nightmare. I'm-" she breathes deep, tries not to panic. "I'm having a nightmare. I changed everything. No more monsters." _No more monsters_ , she repeats in her head, liking the sound of it. She looks up at the man, raises her hand to match his, and lets the red tendrils fly free. "That's what you are."

The man pales when the red glow falls on his face, stumbling back, hand dropping. "Wanda?" he breathes, looking around wildly at his environment, the dim fear that had been in his eyes before now reigniting to full-blown terror. _It knows her name_. "Wanda, what have you done-"

She wakes up screaming. Her mother is there in an instant, and Wanda sobs in relief into her soft dark hair. It wasn't real.

* * *

She grows. She gets bigger. With her brother by her side, they race through the streets of Sokovia. Pietro is quiet, and slow, and that seems so very wrong.

There are many things that seem wrong to her now. Things that don't match up to what she thinks should be true. The soldiers in the street that she doesn't remember, even though this is the only memory she has of them. The posters inciting rebellion and revolution. The men and women that come by her house, the ones that her parents instruct her to call 'Aunt' and 'Uncle' - after she has already done so, the familiarity and fondness rising in her from the moment Viktor Creed and Raven Darkholme walk through the door. The packages they hand to her parents alongside the gifts of sweets they bring her and Pietro, the ones her parents never open with their children in the room.

The packages she hunts for later while her parents are at work, having faked illness. The plain brown paper is gone, but Wanda finds guns hidden in the back of her father's closet.

She doesn't remember this. No, she corrects herself. She doesn't remember it being _like this_.

Wanda grows, and her thoughts slowly start to fix themselves as she does. She doesn't dream about the man on the rock again, but there's far worse than that waiting for her at night. She sees her parents dying in a waterfall of rubble. She sees a shock of blond hair going black at the root disappearing as a body bag pulls closed. She sees her city rising in the air, her countrymen screaming. There are robots, silver and red and red and gold. There is a hole in the floor, airport in ruins, and recriminating guilt. There is a box that she is locked inside, and no matter how she screams she can't get out.

Above all, there is hatred. Wanda dreams of hatred so vast and overwhelming and red. She cannot handle it; cannot handle that it comes from her.

But it _is_ hers. It's all hers. The nightmares, the feelings, this entire world, its all hers. Wanda made it.

She is eight years old. She is thirty years old. Her brother is alive. Her brother is dead. Someone killed him. Someone is going to kill him if she doesn't stop it.

(But she did stop it, didn't she?)

Late at night she creeps to her parents beaten up computer and boots it up. As she waits, Pietro comes creeping up behind her, folding his arms around her shoulders. "What are we looking for, Wanda?" he asks, and it makes her want to cry. _We_. That's right. They belong together. They were torn apart. But Wanda's fixed it. This is her world now, and what is hers is Pietro's.

"Why are you awake?"

"Because you were," Pietro mumbles as she takes the cursor to the internet icon. "I dreamt of smoke. I couldn't breathe."

"You're fine now," she reassures him, placing her free hand over his. "You're with me. I won't let anything happen to you." She turns around to smile at her brother, to see him looking through her with pale, faraway eyes.

"That's right," he says, sounding dazed. "I was dreaming. You pulled me out of it."

She sees the body bag from her nightmares again and knows, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that her brother had been inside of it. "I saved you," she whispers, and turns back to the screen. She has to be sure.

She reaches out for the keyboard, difficult with the way her twin is clinging to her, but she makes no effort to shrug him off, typing the letters one by one.

'Anthony Edward Stark'

She presses the enter key and holds her breath. "Who is that?" Pietro whispers.

'No results found,' the internet tells them.

Wanda smiles almost helplessly, turning around and hugging her brother. "Nobody."

* * *

 One night not long after they turn nine, a firefight breaks out on the streets. Her father is not home. Her mother will not leave the window, even when Pietro begins screaming.

She has never seen her brother like this before, not even in her memories. At every gunshot his body jerks, his eyes rolling up to show the whites. "Go help him. I have to watch the door!" her mother hisses to her, and in the time she takes her eyes off her brother to turn and plead with her mother, Pietro has left the room.

She finds him under their parents' bed.

(This is where they hid the first time, during this fight and after, when the bombs dropped. Part of the building fell away, their parents with it, and Pietro had dragged her under hear, putting his hands over her ears and eyes like he always did. Later, when all grew quiet, she wanted to leave, to go search for them, because her parents had always come back before, but Pietro kept her still. He showed her why: the bomb sitting in their hallway, labelled STARK.)

"Make it stop," he wheezes when she crawls under the frame to get to him, curling further into the wall. "Wanda, I am dreaming, yes? Make it stop. Like before. Make it stop."

She reaches for him. Her brother is smaller than she remembers - he only goes out when she is with him, and even less nowadays with soldiers on every corner, so he gets less exercise, less sun.

"What is wrong?" she says, rocking him as best she can while they are in a horizontal position.

"That noise-" and as if on cue there is another spurt of gunfire. Pietro scratches gouges in her arm with the force of his flinch. "I can't stand it. It reminds me..."

He trails off into a whimper, shaking his head. "Reminds you of what?" Wanda asks.

"Of death. I dream - I dream I die sometimes. There's smoke, I can't breathe, and _that noise_ is coming for me. And then I die, and I can't find you." Her heart drops like a cold stone into her stomach. Pietro cannot remember. It isn't possible. He would have said something by now.

"I'm here, now," she whispers to him. Slowly, she reaches up, raps an arm under his head so it covers one ear and his eyes, just like he used to for her. "That was a nightmare, Pietro. You're not going to die, not ever. We'll keep each other safe. I promise." She puts her free hand over his other ear, and waits for the gunfire to stop.

Her father is the one to pull them out later. He is wet, like he has recently showered, but the stench underlying the thick smell of soap triggers a memory in her of this exact moment. She hadn't recognized it then, but she does now. She is intimately familiar with the smell of blood.

* * *

"We have to do something soon, Erik," Raven Darkholme hisses at her father as the little band of freedom fighters her father has assembled gathers in the kitchen. Her mother put her and Pietro to bed hours ago but neither of them sleep very well any more. Her mother had thumbed the purple hollows of their eyes absent-mindedly before leaving them be, not even bothering to close the door all the way. Now the twins linger at the doorway, listening to their parents plan a protest.

"You think picket lines and signs will be enough," Raven continues. Beside her, Viktor scoffs. "We need action."

"We had action!" her father nearly shouts. He casts an eye down the hallway where his children's bedroom lies and lowers his voice. "The streets ran red, or has the memory already faded for you? It hasn't for me. None of those men needed to die."

"Sokovia is dying," her mother replies. She is transformed from the kind woman who pulled their covers over their shoulders just hours ago. She is transformed from the mother Wanda knew, singing lullabies and baking snacks. Magda Maximoff is hard, and cold, and bitter, and Wanda will grow up to look so much like her. "Sacrifices must be made to save it. I know what I am fighting for, Erik. Our children, our future. Our home. What do you fight for?"

Her father doesn't answer that night, or the next, or the next. Wanda finds him one day staring out a window to the street below. Sokovia is poor, and has not yet scrounged up the money to fix the pockmarks littering the streets from the bullets.

"Papa," she says, laying a hand on his arm. Her poor, sad father, hair going white from the stress. Now she understands what she didn't before, why Papa suddenly was home all the time, no longer at work. Why Aunt Raven and Uncle Viktor suddenly entered their lives. Why she found her father on the couch sometimes at night when she wanted a glass of water instead of in bed with their mother.

She had been quite happy in her ignorance before. But she consoles herself with the fact that they have time now to fix all this. With Stark gone, the bomb that killed her parents will never fall. Without Ultron, Sokovia won't either. In Wanda's new world, everything will be better. She's sure of it.

"Don't look so sad, Papa."

Her father looks down at her and then he is reaching down, picking her up and holding her close, even though at nearly ten she is far too big for this. "Wanda, my Wanda," he says, the words rolling together from how often he has said them in that exact same tone and cadence. "My big brave girl. Don't look sad, you say?"

"I do," she says imperiously, just to hear his laugh.

"Well, you do know best, my Wanda. I will endeavor to be happy, at your command." He tickles her and she shrieks, wriggling in his arms. Her cry summons Pietro, who valiantly protects his sister by tackling his father round the waist. They all go down in a clumsy, slightly painful pile, and her mother is standing at the door, smiling, before joining all of them. Wanda carves this moment into her head; this never happened before. She hadn't even realized her father was sad at all. This is a brand new memory, one the old Wanda never had. It's all hers.

Three nights later there is another skirmish with the State Police. Her father comes in smelling of sweat and blood again. There is a bottle in his hand and the stench of alcohol in the air. Before his wife can usher him away he spots his children standing at the end of the hallway, eyes wide. "To your happiness, my love," he salutes Wanda, and then their parents disappear into the bedroom.

The fighting gets worse. More and more often, Mama forgets to turn off the TV when the reports come on the news. Pietro can never watch but Wanda can't help herself. She understands the conflict now in a way that she never did before, even when she grew up and could look back and could look at the past with eyes not quite so burdened by loss.

She does not blame her parents for their freedom fighting. The government is corrupt, and the ones who enforce it even more so. In fact, she is proud of them for taking a stand, the way she has always been. But the reports show destroyed neighborhoods, dead boys and girls in raggedy uniforms that are hardly even twice her age, proud Sokovian families fleeing the city in droves to a countryside that doesn't want and cannot handle them. And she knows better than anyone that it will not get better. She is not naive enough to believe that stopping Stark will stop the conflict.

"We should leave," she tells her parents, and they look up at her startled.

Beside her, Pietro starts nodding fervently. "We should. We should leave, Papa."

"What's gotten into you two?" her mother wonders.

Pietro looks past her, to the window. "The sky might fall," he whispers. "I'm scared."

Wanda reaches over, grasping her twin's hand in her own. On the other side of Pietro, her father does the same after a brief pause. "I know you're both scared," he says softly, soothingly. "But this won't last forever, alright? You both just stay brave for me, can you do that? Just a little longer?" The twins promise, and their parents are careful to turn the TV off whenever they enter the room from then on.

The fighting gets worse. Then worse again. Her father is out at all hours. The twins turn ten, and there is a paltry celebration. They are getting close, Wanda realizes. Close to nothing, she reminds herself an instant later. There is no Stark. There are no bombs. Her parents are going to live. After the bombing there is a mass exodus out of the city - that is when the Maximoffs will escape. She can be strong, like she promised. Just a little longer.

The schools shut down. She remembers this vividly, how one seemed to happen right on top of the other. Sure enough, the government goes into lockdown a week later. News vans from foreign countries begin patrolling their streets in a higher frequency than before. The calm before the storm, she remembers.

At the last instant, she begins to fear. Stark was not the only man who could build a bomb, after all. Her father is constantly with Raven and Viktor, and she braves Raven's condescension and Viktor's uncomfortable stare one night to ask him once more if they could leave. It is three days until the night they died, once upon a time. "Go to bed, My Wanda," her father says tiredly, and she knows she won't get through to him tonight.

* * *

Six days later, the bombs have not fallen. Wanda heaves a sigh of relief and exultation, and goes to sleep that night with a lighter heart than she can remember having for a long time.

Sometime later, she awakens, though she doesn't know why. Pietro is already up, staring out of the window. "What are you doing?" she asks him, and he turns. The lights of the city light him up strangely from behind, casting a halo around his head.

"Wanda," he says. "I heard a noise."

Behind him, in the city, a building explodes.

Pietro is catapulted forward from the tremble that goes through the city. Wanda's view is unimpeded as the building, the one next to her father's former workplace, begins crumbling around the hole in its side. "No," she finds herself muttering when Pietro's questing fingers at her feet jolt her out of her shock. Her brother has crawled to her bed. "No no nonono."

"Wanda! Pietro!" Her parents scream from outside their room. Their mother is there in an instant, dragging Pietro up by the arm and latching onto Wanda to pull them both out into the hall.  

Papa is already there, buttoning up his pants, holding coats for the twins. Mama shoves their feet into boots. "Where are we going?" Wanda asks for both of them, for Pietro cannot speak. He is shaking like a leaf beside her, face so pale he could be a ghost. 'Make it stop,' she hears him mutter. "What is happening?"

"There is a shelter a few blocks away. Do you remember the Ivanovs' pharmacy?" Her mother takes Wanda by the shoulders. Mama has never been frightened before. All of Wanda's knowledge, the pain and experience that has sharpened her mind past that of any child's, is falling away. Her parents are scared, and the city is burning. She is that same little girl she was twenty two years ago all over again, confused and frightened. _Make it stop._ "Wanda! Do you remember?"

"Yes!" Wanda squeaks when her mother shakes her. "Yes, Mama."

"They have a shelter in their basement. They will take you in. We are going there right now." Pietro steps into his remaining shoe and Papa takes him by the hand, nodding to his wife. "Whatever happens, whatever you see, don't stop running. Do you understand?"

Papa takes one of Wanda's hands and wraps it around Pietro's. Mama takes the other one. "Don't stop running," her father repeats, and the ground trembles again. The Maximoffs head out into the night.

On the ground, people are running and screaming, and her parents push them aside uncaringly, pressing forward. There are soldiers on the streets on both sides, an all out war breaking out around them, but her parents never stop. Pietro stumbles, sobbing openly, but Wanda keeps a tight hold on him.

This isn't right, she thinks on a loop. This isn't happening. This is a bad dream. I will wake up. I will wake up.

She closes her eyes, trusting her feet and her parents to lead her, but the sounds don't fade, and when she opens them again she is in the same world. Above them, in front of them, something whistles through the air and the apartment building her classmate Galina Petrova lives in explodes into rubble. There is a loud cry, a push and a pull from around them, and suddenly her mother's hand slips from hers.

"NO!" she screams, but it goes unheard. All she can see is Pietro. Her parents are nowhere to be found. She's lost them, she tells herself. All she has to do is find them. There's just too many people, and she is so small, she can't see them.

There is another whistle, another explosion, and Pietro is screaming, dragging her forward. "Stop!" she shouts. "We have to find them!"

"We have to run!" her brother returns. "Don't stop running!"

They trip over rubble, over bodies. People fall down on either side of them on the street as the bullets fly free. Behind and above and all around them there is fire and noise and _oh God, no, please, no, I fixed it, I fixed it, I fixed it._

"Don't stop running," her brother is shouting, over and over. She can hardly see him through the smoke. All Wanda knows out here is her brother's hand in hers and the noise. _That noise._ They reach the door of the pharmacy, its automatic doors broken open. There is a man in the doorway and Pietro inexplicably stops for him. "Come on," he says. "Don't stop running. We're almost there." He reaches down to shake the man and his heads tips over, revealing the missing quarter that kept him from responding. Something in Pietro seems to shut down at that, and it is she who has to lead them the rest of the way.

They are one of the last the Ivanovs take in. Their parents do not follow.

* * *

Wanda and Pietro Maximoff spend three days in that shelter. On the first day, Pietro cannot move, fighting off tremors and shakes and terrors all alone in a corner, unwilling to let even Wanda touch him. She sits three feet away from him and doesn't sleep.

By the second day the moans of the injured are almost too much for her to bear. She used to save people, once upon a time. She was a hero. Then she changed things, fixed things. She had ridded the world of a monster and in doing so had saved thousands of lives. She was a daughter and a sister and a Sokovian once more.

Now its all gone again.

"No more monsters," she mumbles to herself. Its an old phrase, one she used to console herself at night when she was a child. Now she remembers it for what it was. A wish that, when the universe wouldn't grant it to her, she reached out and created with her own hands. This is not what she wanted.

Pietro pulls himself together as his sister falls apart. He makes his way over to the triage area and asks if he can help. "We can't sleep," he tells old Mr. Ivanov. "I'll work if you'll give us something."

"I have nothing like that for children," Mr. Ivanov says. "And even if I did, I need it for the wounded."

Pietro looks past him, towards men and women and children filled with bullet wounds and shrapnel. His hands, which have been shaking nonstop, go still. "I'll help anyway," he says, tilting his chin up in a parody of a former life's cockiness when Mr. Ivanov looks to protest. The old man settles with a sigh.

For a day Wanda watches dully as her brother's small hands are put to use reaching inside of people and pulling things out, threading stitches for other workers. He looks worriedly to Wanda every few minutes, but she is trapped immobile, not just by her own emotion but the sheer maelstrom surrounding her. Everyone in this room is terrified, and her shields are not what they once were. It is all she can do to grit and bear it and not fall asleep. She does not want to know what this shelter will do to her dreams.

They send Pietro away, back to her, sometimes around the third day. He is more blood than person now, so she wipes his face clean with her sleeve. All it does is mix the ash on her clothes in, forming a gruesome paste on his face. "Why?" she asks in a small voice.

"I wanted to help," he answers simply. "I was scared - I still am. But I wasn't dying, not like them. I would not wish the way I feel in my dreams on anyone. So I had to save them. Like you did, for me."

"I didn't save anyone," Wanda says harshly, but Pietro merely puts his arm around her and holds her close.

Ivanov finally deems it safe to leave some hours later, although how much is down to some of his patients needing more care than he can provide Wanda doesn't know. Three days, and the streets of her city are still littered with bodies. She sees Galina lying face up, three feet away from her father. Wanda pushes her closer to him, takes off her jacket, and lays it over their faces.

Others from the shelter seem to take this as an example, but Pietro keeps his on as they pick through.

The city is in ruins, worse than she remembers. Their apartment building is gone. It will all be rebuilt, she thinks bitterly. Brushed over, cleaned up, a black mark on Sokovia's already wretched history. No one will care in a few years. There was no religious impetus for this, no xenophobia, just a country gone wrong and the people who tried to fix it and failed. History does not look kindly upon the losers.

In the last place she saw them, Pietro and Wanda find their parents. The tips of their fingers are still touching, like they had been holding hands when they'd fallen. Pietro takes his jacket off, and lays it over their faces.

"Mama. Papa." He fiddles with the jacket, laying it just so, pulling this way and that so it covers the spill of their mother's hair. Finally Wanda kneels down and reaches to push it over, under the fabric, but then she can't stop running her fingers through it. There is dirt and grime in it now, but it is her mother's same soft dark hair. Wanda used to wrap it around her fingers as a younger girl while Mama read her stories.

"Please," she whispers. She means to yell it, but she can't get it past the lump in her throat. "Please."

* * *

 The news only shows it once, in a report that will be blacklisted later on, its tape burned and the digital evidence destroyed, but there is bomb found in the wreckage of Sokovia City. On its side is labeled STARK.

* * *

 She finds herself back in the dream, out in space.

The man turns when he hears her footfalls in the dust and all the rage comes back when she sees his face. "You!" she screams. Red shoots out of her fingers, knocking him several feet back. He scrambles away from her on the heels of his hands and feet. "It's still broken! It still happened. I was supposed to have fixed it but _it - still - happened!"_  

Her knees buckle as she wails out her grief. Her throat burns. She wonders if she is screaming in both worlds, if Pietro is trying to wake her right now. Around her she feels the universe shiver around the force of her anger.

"Why did it happen?" she sobs out. "Why?"

"They still died, didn't they?" She looks up to find the man watching her with pained dark eyes. "Your parents."

She wraps her arms around herself, holding herself together, and he sighs. "Wanda-"

" _Don't_ say my name," she snarls. "Don't you dare say my name!"

There is a long pause and then he speaks again, sounding much closer. "Fine. Just tell me this - is this you? Did you do this? I'm not supposed to be out here, this isn't real. Do you remember?"

She looks up at him, blurry through the tears. _Tony Stark._ "I made the world better. I pulled you out. Why isn't it better?" She doesn't expect him to know the answer. He's not real. He can't be. She's having a nightmare. This isn't real. _This isn't real_.

His face goes white and for the briefest moment she sees her own emotions reflected in him. His gaze turns towards the stars and he looks so destroyed, so defeated. "Well," he says hoarsely. "A wise man once told me that I invented a lot of things. War wasn't one of them. I suppose cruelty and maliciousness didn't come from me either, though-" He laughs and it is horrible. "Though I wield them so well. Wanda, listen to me. You were angry, do you remember? You might have done something. Your powers-"

"I can't," she whispers. "It was wrong, that place was wrong. Don't you get that? You made sacrifices. Why can't I?"

"I never chose myself over an entire world," he snaps, hand reaching out. She's having a nightmare. Tony Stark isn't real anymore.

"I can fix this," she weeps and reaches out for the universe. It shimmers into existence around her, the strings she remembers plucking before but they are tangled now, and knotted. She wants to find the string of this dream, the cut thread that was her childhood but when she tries the universe _screams._

"What," Stark breathes, and then "No, don't _leave me here."_

Wanda wakes _._


	3. In Rewarding The Good

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "You know. You sound a lot like me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place from the time Wanda and Pietro are ten to when they are fourteen, 2004-2008.

_"I have substituted myself for Providence in rewarding the good; may the God of vengeance now yield me His place to punish the wicked.”_

* * *

The United Nations declares a state of emergency and sends in troops. Sokovia is once again occupied. History repeats itself, and history changes: the Ivanovs had died the first time. This time they live, and take in the twins.

Wanda and Pietro sleep side by side on a tiny bed. She listens to her brother talk in his sleep, call out to their parents, to God. Sometimes she wakes him, sometimes she doesn't. He always wakes her, just before her powers can act up and terrify the Ivanovs. Mysticism and witchcraft is still both highly respected and very feared in her country. She shudders to think what they who don't understand might do to her.

_'Howard Stark was an American businessman and industrialist, best known for his work with Captain America and his Howling Commandos, the Manhattan Project, and his successful weapons manufacturing company, Stark Industries...Howard and his wife were killed in a car accident on December 16, 1991 while heading towards a private airfield...Stark Industries was left to Stark's CFO, Obadiah Stane. who then assumed ownership of the company.'_

"You writing a report?" Olga, Ivanov's wife, asks her while peering over her shoulder at the computer screen. Wanda nods and the woman pats her on the shoulder. "Such a hard worker. Your parents would be proud of you, Wanda."

She buries that stab of guilt with all the others and focuses on the screen. Obadiah Stane, CEO of Stark Industries. She remembers his name vaguely from the other world, but he had died in the late 2000s. Some had said that Tony Stark had killed him in retaliation of a coup Stane had tried to pull when Stark broke away from weapons manufacturing. Wanda had not paid much attention at the time, too consumed with her grief and her rage. Perhaps she should have.

She will destroy this man, she vows it. She once waited over a decade for Stark. She can bide her time now.

* * *

Wanda is out on the streets one day when a man falls in step beside her. "Creed," she breathes out, too shocked to remember the honorific. Like the Ivanovs, he had died before. Here, he lives. The man grins, a gleaming yellow smile that makes her stomach turn.

"Is that any way to greet your favorite uncle, Wanda?"

"You survived."

"Despite their best efforts," Viktor scoffs, scowling. "I heard about your parents, Wanda. They were damn good people, didn't deserve that kind of end."

"Thank you," Wanda replies stiffly, for lack of anything better to say.

Viktor steps neatly in front of her, blocking her path. "We can't let what happened stand, Wanda, you know that, right?" She stares up at him and he crouches down to her level. He smells putrid, like something is rotting inside him. "We have to fight back. Our own government doesn't belong here, do you think the UN's have any more of a right?"

Wanda pulls in two different directions, all at once very frightened and also very angry. "What are you getting at?"

"If you want to fight back, join the cause...make your parents proud." It is a slick, sly delivery. "Come look for us. The Brotherhood. Look for the palm in the star."

"I'm ten," she protests. Viktor just grins harder.

"You are your parents' child. We'd be lucky to have you." He leaves her in the middle of the sidewalk, staring where he stood. She's forgotten what she's come out for and runs all the way home.

Pietro doesn't sleep much anymore; he spends his time studying or up on the roof. She finds him there when she hunts for him, staring up at the stars. "What are you looking for?"

"Just the stars," her brother replies. "They seem so far away."

"They are."

Pietro reaches a hand upwards as if to touch them and pull them down. "I dream about them much closer. I am on an asteroid hanging in between them, looking down on earth."

His description sends chills down her spine. "That sounds very lonely, brother."

"Only sometimes," he says vaguely, dropping his hand. "I don't wish to talk about my dreams. I feel like my whole life revolves around them. Where have you been? Your face is so pale."

Haltingly, she relates her encounter with their parent's former friend. Pietro's face grows stormier the longer her tale goes on. "You did not say yes, did you?"

"Would that be a problem?" Wanda asks, suddenly curious. "Sokovia is stalling, Pietro. We are slipping back into the status quo of before. What are parents fought for, what they died for, is it all to be for nothing?"

"And you want to follow in their footsteps?" Pietro asks, standing up.

"I want to do something that matters. I want to change things." That is all Wanda has ever wanted. There is so much injustice in the world and the world was content to allow it. Wanda went to HYDRA the first time because she knew they would give her the power to stop it. Starting with Tony Stark and his Avengers. She learned better later, but what drove her in the end was the same thing that always had. She did not like seeing the weak ground under the boot of the powerful. She fought even when she had no power of her own before; surely she cannot stand to the side now.

Pietro used to agree with her. They had protested together at the rallies, screaming their rage while they held hands.

"Our parents' way brought violence and death," Pietro says, shaking his head. "I want no part of that."

"Our parents fought for freedom! For our rights! That can't always be gained with words and negotiations, Pietro, sometimes you have to fight," Wanda says, aghast at her brother's words. "It's not their fault. What happened to them, to us, it has nothing to do with them and everything to do with those that attacked us!"

Pietro stiffens, stepping back, hands going up. "I did not mean - of course I don't blame them, Wanda. I just - don't agree. I am tired of war, sister. I'm tired of death. I just want to help people. If my way of helping ends in innocent people dying, then that is no way at all."

Cautiously, he approaches her to wrap her in a hug. He is so much less substantial than she remembers. So much different than the brother she once had. She thinks for a moment, about peering into his head, seeing where things went different, but she dashes the thought the moment it flits through her mind. She would never do that to him.

"I don't want to go anywhere you can't follow," she tells him, and he holds her tighter.

"Then we stay together."

* * *

She gathers more information about Stark Industries and the man who runs it and tells herself she is not obsessed. Stane smiles in every picture she sees of him, not the cold, distant plastic smiles that Stark used to wear for the TVs but warm and wet and oozing. She feels them on her skin.

She hates. Oh, how she hates.

(Sometimes, she still feels the gap between herself and the old Wanda, but here is where they merge: she would gladly destroy the world just to make that man suffer like she has. An eye for an eye. A life for a life. Stane owes her.)

Pietro busies himself with school work and working in the pharmacy. He takes to sitting with the small children waiting to get their medication, distracting them by playing doctor. School is easy for Wanda, even after missing most of it in her previous life, and time passes.

Her world has narrowed down into finer points that it had ever before: she knows there are things to worry about, HYDRA out in the hills and out in the halls of governments, evil out in the far reaches of space ready to reach down to Earth, but she cannot let her parents' deaths be for nothing, not again. She cannot let their deaths go unpaid, _again_. 

It won't be like before, she promises herself. She has the power now.

* * *

Sokovia is failing. There are other bombings, smaller than the first, some in other cities. People leave the country in droves. Her once thriving city seems like a ghost town some days. Sokovia falls apart, just like it did before.

She walks through her city and all she can see is the white hand on a blue star. Their number and location grows every day. People whisper about them on the streets, how they're making a difference, how they're standing up to the government, how they're getting people out of Sokovia. That last rumor in particular snags and tangles in her mind. She is caught between her need to stay and fight at home and her need to balance the scales between herself and Stane. Mr. Ivanov encourages the twins to keep their heads down, but it galls Wanda to just sit back and not do anything. Maybe she can help them. Maybe they can help her.

It can't hurt to know.

It takes her a few tries to be pointed to where Viktor Creed is staying. He and Raven are all over the news these days, wanted criminals for crimes against the state. Others, not broadcasted to the country and the world beyond, have made them into heroes.

"Little Maximoff!" Viktor cries when she finds him. Raven is by his side, observing Wanda with judgment in her gaze. "All grown up. It's been two years, Wanda. What made you change your mind?"

"I haven't. I just wanted to know the truth," Wanda says. "We can't rely on the news to tell us the truth."

That raises a small cheer from the raggedy bunch gathered, and Viktor chuckles. "From the mouth of babes!" And the cheer grows louder. "I tell you now, Little Max, you can trust us."

Wanda lifts her chin, determined not to be intimidated or used. Never again. "What are you going to do?"

"Right now, we wait," Raven says. "We gather information to use when the time is right. That's where you come in. A little street urchin like you? You're perfect." She makes it sounds like a compliment.

"I am not an urchin!"

"No, I am mistaken, aren't I? You live with the Ivanovs now. All sorts of people coming and going," Raven hints with a small smile. One of her incisors pokes over her lip, sharp and gleaming white. Wanda looks away. "If you hear anything..."

"I can do more," Wanda says.

Viktor laughs. "Such spirit! So like her mother. This is what we need for now, Little Max. Nothing more."

It wounds her pride, irrational as that is. She isn't weak, or useless. She is more powerful than anyone in this room, anyone on this planet. She won't be dictated to. "If I help you, I want something in exchange."

"Oh?"

"Passage out of Sokovia," she says. "With Pietro. I've heard you're getting people past the border. There are families in England, Germany, willing to take children, I've heard." 

Viktor eyes her speculatively. "You've heard right. Why flee, though? Sokovia needs you."

And I need to get to America, Wanda thinks. She could manipulate a few minds, but that's not always trustworthy. People do not always bend the way she expects them to. "I wouldn't leave immediately. I'm twelve, there's not much to do but be passed from family to family. But perhaps in a year or so."

Viktor exchanges a long glance with Raven, then nods. "Prove your dedication, and we'll give you everything you need."

There is information running through the Ivanovs' pharmacy everyday, some verbal, some she feels with the slightest press of her powers. Most of it is useless, but some of the people are placed in the government. They can't help but talk and show their superiority. Wanda learns of business plans, mergers, government strikes.

She sees other children occasionally in the various safehouses the Brotherhood keeps. Skinnier, sallow things with dark eyes, clutching at Sokovian coins that are worth less than nothing these days. They run the streets and don't nod when they see her. She tries to hold onto that feeling of pride, that feeling that they are helping and making a difference, but she dreams about those dark eyes when she sleeps, sometimes.

"Where are you going?" Pietro stops her one night when she slips off in the middle of the night to inform the Brotherhood of a weapons shipment coming in from the Balkans later this week. Refreshing the military's weapons. She wonders how many backroom-dealt Stark weapons will be in this load. "Where do you go at night? Don't lie to me Wanda, please."

"To the Brotherhood."

"To the - I thought we talked about this! We said-"

" _You_ said, Pietro. I can no longer sit idly by while our country goes to ruin. I can't let it all be for nothing. I have to fix this."

"Even you can't fix an entire country, Wanda." Pietro looks so sad and small, awash in the covers of their bed. "You promised not to go where I can't follow. We are supposed to stay together. Bad things happen when we separate. One of us is going to get lost."

She rushes to his side before the words are all the way out of his mouth, hugging him close before moving away to frame his face with our hands. "We are going to be fine, Pietro, I promise you. It's only words." He doesn't look like he believes her, but he lets her go.

She lies. It doesn't remain as simply words. Soon she starts going out on raids at night, stealing food and supplies. At first, she leaves their distribution up to the Brotherhood, but she stays longer the more she grows, the more she remembers of how the world works.

Times passes, her year up, but Wanda stays with it. The raids grow larger. Food becomes weapons. Viktor and Raven talk in hushed whispers and the atmosphere grows tense. Wanda remembers this feeling, can sense the anticipation and vengeance in their minds. She must stick with this, she tells herself. They are going to get her out of here, get her to Stane. She'll get her justice no matter what the cost.

"What's going to happen?" Wanda asks Raven when she is feeling particularly unsure. "If you win. Can you even win?"

Raven shrugs. "Probably not," she says, to Wanda's surprise. "But we cause enough unrest, if we make the people see how unhappy they are, they will join our cause. Our efforts today will bring victories tomorrow."

"But what happens to everyone else?"

The gleam in Raven's eye goes sharp. "Remember this, little girl: if they are not with us, then they're against us."

* * *

The fires start soon afterwards. Houses of soldiers, politicians, most of whom can afford to live outside of the city comfortably. Pietro watches the news with wide, wounded eyes. Sometimes a particular clip or sound will play and he begins to panic and can only be calmed by Wanda. The Ivanovs worry over him; there is talk of finally sending them both out of the country. Scraping the money together might bankrupt them, but they persist; Wanda finds little scraps of paper detailing where costs can be cut, where loans can be made. It makes her feel ashamed.

Then, a wife of a soldier, mother to three children, dies in one of the fires. The entire country seems to erupt. It's the spark that Viktor and Raven have been waiting for. Their are soldiers at every corner, protests in the streets. The country splits violently in two and the outsiders are helpless to stop it.

(History is falling like sand through her fingers and it occurs to her that she's been doing this all wrong. She's been trying to fix what she thought was her _past_ , but this is her world, a new world. A different world with a different future.)

"This is not what my parents would have wanted!" Wanda shouts at Viktor when next she sees him, toasting a job well done with Rave. "They didn't stand for terrorism, or killing innocent people!" Her father had lost his soul after that first fight in the streets, the first time he killed a fellow Sokovian. Has Wanda lost hers, now that she's contributed to a mother's death? 

She never wanted this. She wanted things to be better. She wanted to help. This is just death; Wanda does not deal in that. She is not it's Merchant.

"Don't be a child," Viktor snarls. "This is the real world, Wanda. It doesn't cave to pretty words and useless treaties. You can't fight fire with fire, or you'll just get burned; you have to be the first to strike the match. You have stood by us all this time, but the first sight of blood you run like a coward. I should have known, I've always said it. You are your parents' child. Even Magda ran scared near the end. She didn't _stand_ with us. Do you remember what happened to _her_ , Wanda?"

He is grabbing at her, shaking her arm and sneering and she sees Stark and she sees Strucker and Ross and feels that collar around her neck. She is terrified. _No more monsters._

The universe goes red, unspools around her. Tangled threads everywhere, spanning as far as she can see. She reaches out like she did before _nomoremonsters **nomoremonsters**_ and _wrenches_. 

* * *

Something tears. A string stretched too tightly snaps.

Wanda wakes up next to Pietro, and the sun is shining.

* * *

Sokovia is occupied, United Nations soldiers on every street.

There have been protests, some verging on violent, but overall the people have made do with the hand they have been dealt. Wanda and Pietro have attended many a march with the Ivanovs, holding hands together and shouting loudly with the crowd as they circle government buildings.

They hold up signs for the ones they've lost. Their parents, Erik and Magda Maximoff. Galina Petrova and her family.

"What about Uncle Viktor and Aunt Raven?" she asks when they were making them. Ivanov and his wife looked at her worriedly but Pietro stared at the marker in his hand for a very long time, his brow furrowed.

He turns to her and she leans forward, wanting to hear him say it. "Wanda," he whispers. "We don't have an Uncle Viktor or Aunt Raven. Are you okay?"

* * *

"I fixed it," she tells the shadow that haunts her dreams. Stark is content to just watch her today. She's grateful. Sometimes he hurls abuse, sometimes he's not there at all. Sometimes there are different versions of him and sometimes they are terrifyingly young. 

Sometimes he doesn't recognize her, and that is the worst, because he is her. He's not real. It's just her mind, trying to cope, trying to torture her. If he doesn't recognize her, what does that tell her about herself?

"I made a mistake," she admits. "But it's okay, because I - I made it better. I didn't know I could do that." She would have saved her parents before, if she'd known. "Nobody got hurt. Everything I did - I didn't mean it. I didn't want that to happen. Now it didn't." The strands of the universe run red around her and she plucks at one of the knots. There are more every time she looks. Stark's eyes open wide and he steps forward to touch them, and they both watch as the strands warp around his hand, evading him. "I have control," she asserts. "The future is still waiting for me. Isn't that your domain?"

"Wanda, don't-" Stark says, not looking at her but the web surrounding her. 

She squeezes tight around the knot. Somewhere, sometime, something cracks. She still looks at him sometimes and gets so angry. "Well, now it's mine. And I'll do better than you did, Stark. I won't let our team down. I won't turn my back on the world. I'll fix it. I'll fix it."

Stark tilts his head at her, and her fist around the universe, and for a moment there is infinite sadness in his eyes, beyond the fear that never seems to leave. "You know," he says, voice cracking. "You sound a lot like me."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, this was some extreme bastardization of the Brotherhood of Mutants, but this comes with some of the same problems that group had (the most extreme members): they were not wrong in wanting equality for mutants, but so many of them exploited that purpose to sow chaos for their own amusement and gain and didn't care if it hurt mutants along the way, in fact would be quite willing to sacrifice them if it got them what they wanted.


	4. The Sky of the Future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All she remembers when she looks back is that moment when the portal disappeared and the day was won and the fight kept going.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place when Wanda and Pietro are 18 (2012). Sorry this is late, but I ended up fiddling with the ending quite a bit. Also, a bit of trigger warning, though I don't think reading it is quite so bad: Tony is essentially losing his mind.
> 
> Also, there's a lot of talk about 'strings' of the universe, I want to make it clear: the strings are how people's minds interpret actually seeing the universe and how Wanda is using her powers to manipulate things. Also puppeteer imagery.

_"The soul forms its own horizons; your soul is darkened, and consequently the sky of the future appears stormy and unpromising."_

* * *

Wanda runs her finger along the red string, tracing from beginning to end. A newspaper in New Mexico remarks upon the strange appearance of a hammer in the middle of a desert. That same newspaper reports a small town being decimated by a 'storm' a week later. That string leads to a strange gunfight that broke out in Budapest that was neatly covered up; too neatly, if you, like Wanda, were taught stealth by a master spy. That one branches out to many other strings, most of them from crackpot magazines that nobody takes seriously, but Wanda knows better. The weird things that happen in this world are more likely to have happened then not.

There are things even she can't explain: freak weather, stars in the wrong position in the sky one night only to be right where they should be the next, instances of atomic clocks losing or gaining time, radiation spikes. The world, sometimes, seems very mad. She giggles at her own stupid joke and takes a step back.

Pietro (occasionally, when he thinks she can't hear) calls it her Wall of Crazy, but to her it is the Wall of Purpose. Here she keeps track of all the things she's going to change when she gets the chance. She won't let it be like last time.

_No more monsters._

She doesn't have enough information to get to SHIELD, or to stop the Asgardian Loki from attacking Earth like he did last time, but she can stop it from getting worse like it did last time. She has control.

The printer finishes the document it was printing and Wanda picks it up. 'STARK INDUSTRIES CEO OBADIAH STANE MEETS WITH ALDRICH KILLIAN, FOUNDER OF A.I.M' She added it to another, separate part of the wall, specifically dedicated to this one man. She hasn't given up on the idea of bringing him to justice, she just knew how to go about the right way this time.

"Wanda," she hears her brother sigh, disappointed. She whirls, surprised that she drifted so far that she didn't even realize he'd come home. "When are you going to give up on this?"

They had had this argument a thousand times. Pietro hates the Wall, hates what it represented. He was perfectly content to keep his head down, to work hard at school, to get into a good school, to do his job. "Do you not want to see him brought to justice? For our parents? Sokovia? Us, brother?"

"Of course I do," Pietro sighs again. "But what I don't want is to see you drown yourself in revenge. We have had enough of that."

They had been separated from the Ivanovs and shipped off to England two years ago when their exemplary school work had made other countries take notice - get the geniuses out of the failing country while they still could, she supposed with a sneer in her head - living in state-provided housing and going to state-sponsored schools until they came of age.

"You are one to talk of drowning," Wanda scoffs, turning back to the wall. "How many days has it been since I've seen you, brother? Have you cured the entirety of England of their ailments yet? Are you on to heal the greater British Isles, next?" It runs on the thin line between tease and mockery; she does not begrudge her twin his new (different) passions, but so often it seems they are moving in entirely different directions.

"I just want you to be happy, Wanda," Pietro says, coming up behind her to turn her back and pull her into a hug. She tenses up for only a moment, then relaxes. No matter what, she will always have Pietro. Sometimes it hurts, to remember the brother that would have been right beside her, adding little notes to her research, but she loves her brother no matter what way, shape or form he comes in. "You never seem happy, anymore."

"I'm happy now," she mumbles, pulling away. "A letter came today. From New York."

"From-" Pietro's eyes light up and she laughs as he dashes off to the kitchen. She's not worried about what is in the envelope; of course Pietro will get into college, his grades are perfect and his extracurriculars exemplary. She had worried only once, when they were sixteen and pulled Wanda out of class. Pietro had had an attack while dissecting a pig in science glass; she found him curled around himself, staring at the blood on his hands. When he looked up to her, it was clear he was a million miles away.

But he has gotten better since then, or at least better at hiding it. Their lives in London have been quiet while they both prepared for the future.

"Yes!" Pietro shouts from the kitchen, and Wanda wanders out to meet him. New York University has accepted him with a generous scholarship. Wanda has already been accepted to a smaller school in the area. The Maximoffs are heading to New York. Right on time.

* * *

There are other articles, reports that she doesn't touch or look at after the first time. She keeps them locked in a drawer and when the twins move to New York, she doesn't take them with them.

_'I have dreams,'_ the articles read. People from all over the world, confessing to crackpot magazines no one will take seriously. _'I dream of my life, but it's different. Little things. It feels so real._ '

Sokovians who report dreams of fires and death and white hands. Americans who have found each other online, talking about the 'Red Man' who sometimes visits them at night. There is a one article that focuses on the few survivors of a terrorist attack in Gulmira, Afghanistan in , who all report the same dream. _'My father lives, and my two nephews,'_ one woman says. _'I cherish those dreams. I never want to wake up.'_

Pietro, who murmurs in his sleep sometimes, begging for mercy, asking for forgiveness, asking _you_   _didn't see that coming?_

* * *

She dreams of Stark.

Stark on his far away rock, Stark who slips from one form to the next. He looks at her and his eyes glow red from within. There are cracks in the rock and in the sky and a sound like a razor on piano wire. 

"You don't get it, do you?" He asks, and he speaks with a thousand voices now. Her nightmares have only grown more terrifying over the years. "I've seen the strings, I know what you've done, you're breaking it, Wanda."

He splinters into a thousand pieces, reforms in the next moment, younger, then older, then wrapped in red and gold. Through the speakers, when he talks next, he is sobbing. "You have to - please, Wanda, I'm sorry - you have to fix it-"

"I have." 

"You haven't. You're breaking it," he accuses. "And you don't even care, do you? What does it matter if other people get hurt. As long as you're happy, right, Wanda?" His form slides into the one most familiar to her: black leather jacket, arm in a sling. Only this time he is the one who is caged like a rat and she is free. He is furious and impotent and she has the power. "Are you happy, Wanda? Tell me. Tell me it's worth it."

She doesn't answer. She wakes up in her New York apartment, Pietro snoring loudly on the other side of the room. He has his own bedroom, but neither twin can sleep if they can't hear the other breathing. Outside, the city is bright and loud. She goes to the window, watches the traffic roll by. She turns to look at the Wall, carefully transplanted from London. She is one step closer to stopping Stane, one step closer to bringing down Loki.

She's happy. Of course she is. There's no reason not to be.

The next day, almost a full five months before it happened the last time, a hole is torn in the sky, and aliens attack New York.

* * *

They come down in the dead of night. One moment New York City is quiet, or as quiet as can be, and then a beam of light shoots up from the Empire State Building and a portal rips itself out of the sky.

Wanda is awakened by sirens wailing across the city, and she and Pietro stumble out onto the street with the rest of their apartment building. Even from hear, Wanda can hear the screaming, alien and human alike.

And under that, so subtle it's almost inaudible, the sound of razors on piano wire.

She begins to run into the violence, intent on finding Loki and doing her best to hold him at bay until the Avengers get here. She doesn't know how they closed the portal last time. 

They'll be here. Steve, Natasha, Clint. In the midst of chaos, her heart momentarily lifts. She's missed them so much. She can't wait to see what her friends will become in this brand new world.

Pietro is right by her side, as well as a few others who intend to help. NYU's campus is not so far from the epicenter of violence, but by the time they arrive anywhere close to violence buildings are already on fire and cars overturned on the streets. There are bodies scattered around and she pushes back the memory of Sokovia, turning to check on Pietro.

He is standing stock still, staring at the scene laid out in front of them, and she whispers his name urgently. They will not remain undisturbed for long. "We have to keep moving!" she hisses, and a scream erupts down the street.

A Chitauri soldier leaps down from the building, weapon raised, and in one quick motion, Wanda rips his body asunder and flings the pieces aside. The others stop to stare at her, but there is no time to comment, as other aliens are joining the fray.

"Grab their weapons if you can," she commands, red pouring from her fingertips. Blasts and shields, keep control, Wanda. A Chitauri flings some kind of grenade and she sends it sailing back. "Fight back!"

She clears the street just as the first Leviathan appears in the sky. Pietro is stumbling beside her, his eyes wide and white and roving. "Brother-" she begins, and he grabs her hand harshly.

"What did you do?" he asks, twisting her fingers so they point upwards between them, his eyes on the fingertips. "You - why is this - _what did you do?_ "

There is a crash, an explosion, from down the street and then suddenly Pietro is blinking hard, confused, and pulling away. "I-" he starts, looking all around him like he doesn't know where he is. "What's happening? What are those?"

"They're aliens. They want to hurt us; I must go," she says, raising her hands. "I have to help. Pick up a gun, Pietro. Fight with me."

But Pietro shakes his head, stepping away from her again, and again. "There are people here that need my help, Wanda," he says, gesturing around the area, people crying out as they lay on the ground. Wendy Lansing, who lived two floors down from them, is one of them, her left arm complete gone; one of Pietro's fellow pre-med students is already with her, ripping off his shoelaces to form a tourniquet. "I can't just leave them like this."

"There will be more, further in," she reminds him, reaching in between the gulf he's put between them. "Let your friends help these; I need you with me."

Pietro hesitates, then takes her hand. They run.

* * *

The night is flashes of light and violence until the dawn breaks, and the Avengers have not arrived. The military has sent in fighter jets, and they dart through the skies exchanging fire with the Chitauri fliers, but the Chitauri seem infinite and fewer jets buzz by as the hours pass.

There is a bomb coming, too. She must remember that. Stark caught it last time, took it into the portal and destroyed the aliens. Wanda will have to do that this time.

The twins are holed up in a building on Park, where Pietro is performing very rudimentary emergency surgery on a man with rebar through his stomach while others help or hide. Wanda is out on the street, flinging away anything that comes near them, but she is flagging.

The city is on fire.

She has to get to Loki, but she can't just abandon Pietro. She can't lose him again.

She's tried, once or twice when there is a lull, to reach out, to pull and wrench at the universe, to make things right, but the strings are vibrating, knotting before her eyes, and before she can grab hold her attention is pulled. The beam in the sky is incredibly unstable and the portal seems to grow every hour. It blended in with the night before but as the sun breaks over the horizon, it becomes more clear: a black maw in the middle of their sky, pouring forth destruction. 

"Wanda," Pietro says from inside, and she turns to see Pietro's bloody hands slipping away from the man's body. Pietro is practically drenched in red. She checks the street then hurries in, dragging him away and into the circle of her arms. The blood gets on her arms, her hands.

Scarlet, as far as the eye can see.

"We're almost there," she whispers to him.

He holds on to her, trembling. "Make it stop. Please. Pull me out, Wanda. Wake me up."

She rocks him back and forth, kisses his head, vacillates between old lullabies and nonsense murmurings, until a new wave approaches. She gets up, she fights again.

Finally, finally, lightning fills the sky. Thor has arrived. She can't see any of the other Avengers, but she isn't surprised, since most of those left are confined to the ground. Thor lingers near the Empire State Building, fighting another.

"I have to get there," she shouts to her brother, and he nods, instructs the others to hide, and follows.

The civilians are doing what they can, picking up weapons man- and alien-made alike, but the city is falling. She passes by men and women shooting from behind their friends' corpses, scrambles over huge piles of rubble where the Leviathans have carved through buildings. She doesn't panic. None of this has to be perfect. If she can just- she'll find Loki's thread, like she did Stark, and Creed, and Darkholme. She'll take out all the monsters. 

A shield flies out of nowhere, familiar red, white, and blue, and her heart catches in her throat.

Steve Rogers is in all black, looking shell-shocked and younger than she has ever seen him even as he takes down a Chitauri with one punch. Beside him fights Natasha Romanov, switching between pistols and fists seamlessly. She can't see Clint. She hasn't heard the Hulk's roars. But she sees Steve, and she feels tears prick at her eyes.

She runs towards him, throwing aliens left and right, and both of the Avengers turn to watch her progress. Steve keeps his eyes on her even as he flings his shield, his stance tight and his gaze unfriendly, while Natasha pulls one pistol to face Wanda while firing away at an approaching alien.

"I am-" Wanda raises her hands. "I am here to help. I can help. Please."

Natasha is the first to accept it. "It's not like our day can get any worse," she says, her eyes holding a particular sort of defeat that Wanda has never seen before. Where's Clint, she wants to ask. Where's Hulk? Where were you? Why weren't you here? Instead she falls into place beside them, fighting with a rhythm they don't have yet, while Pietro hunkers down with other civilians in the buildings.

At some point, Steve starts laughing.

"Are you okay?" Wanda asks hesitantly. They are all wounded and bleeding, but there is a wild, lost look in Steve's eyes that she has only glimpsed from inside his mind, stranded on a bloody dance floor from the past.

"I just woke up. Brand new world, they said," he replies, barely understandable through his desperate chuckles. "I died, then I lived, and now I'm dying again. What was-" he throws the shield; it's a bad throw, only just managing to make the rebound. "What was the point?"

She's never heard him like this. Steve has always been Steve, Captain America, brave and true and strong. Untouchable. Unshakable. This isn't right. I'll fix it, she thinks.

"There's a bomb," Natasha says suddenly, a hand at her ear. "They're sending in a nuke."

Steve is suddenly alert, holding the shield up to cover him while he turns to her. "Where's Thor, can he-"

Natasha is barking orders over the intercom, but she's shaking her head at Steve. "He's pretty bad off, he's been trying to get to the portal. Selvig's there, if he can just - we need the - the scepter? - I don't -" For the first time ever, Wanda thinks she might be witnessing Natasha panicking.

"Banner?" Steve asks, and receives another negative. A strange look passes over his face, not defeat but something worse: peace. Wanda remembers his story, the little he ever told her. He's done this before. "How much time do we have?"

Natasha is silent, shoots down one, two aliens. Then: "Minutes, at most."

Wanda watches the glance they exchange. She looks to the side, where Pietro is looking back at her. His face is spackled in blood (like it was before, when they put in the body bag. She had cleaned him off herself before they buried him. She had carried that bloody washcloth for days.)

"Take care of Pietro," she tells the other two, and with a burst of red, launches herself into the air.

She catches onto a flier and quickly dispatches the pilot, making her way to the Empire State Building. She bats enemies away with wave after wave of her powers until she touches down in a poorly-controlled roll. She stands and means to keep moving, but her breath catches in her throat.

The city is in ruins. Buildings that have not fallen lean precariously against others still standing or on their own exposed support beams. Fighter jets weave around Leviathans as they chase after fliers. On the streets she can see overrun barricades, fire rolling out of buildings.

And somewhere, a nuke is coming.

She has to stop this. 

She runs to where the machine is set up, the place where the beam is sprouting from. There is a man there, a scientist (Selvig. She met him once, he'd called her powers a 'marvel' and didn't seem scared of her unlike the other personnel) trying desperately to shut it down to no avail. "Move!" she screams at him, and throws up her hands.

The universe answers her call, strings pulling out of the concrete, the sky, Wanda herself, twisted and tangled and _screaming_. She surrounds the machine and the tesseract inside, squeezing at it, tearing at it, willing it away, but the screaming only grows louder. Razors on a thousand piano wires.

She plucks and pulls and wrenches, but the tesseract only glows brighter. The world around her fades, dissolving like sand, and she is with Stark, on the rock, and he is screaming at her _"WANDA STOP!"_

 

There is blue bleeding out from between the strings, and it casts a sinister shadow on Stark's face. There leviathans and giant space ships in the sky, and below them is the portal, where she can see below to where Earth is burning.

Pietro is down there.

"Pietro is _dead_ ," Stark snaps, and she can see for the first time the broken strand of him, the one she snapped, wrapped around his neck, dead and black. "He died in Sokovia." Ultron, neither of them say, and another dead string wraps itself around Stark's wrist. Vision, she remembers, and there appears another. Stark is laden down with strings. Even as she watches, more and more blue appears as pieces of the universe knot and stretch and snap, and they reappear to hang off of Stark's body. He wears them well, she thinks, and finds it strangely fitting. "Wanda, it's breaking, energy can't be _destroyed_ -"

 

-and then she is back, the sky above her torn open, and the tesseract is _fighting back_.

"I have to stop it," she whispers to no one. Her mouth tastes like rust. "I have to fix it."

She just has to find the right string.

But the more she pulls, the harder the tesseract fights, and the energy around it is growing wildly unstable. There are cracks in the ground. Cracks in the sky. They widen and grow like spiderwebs across the fabric of her world. She watches in horror as two meet-

There is blue hurtling towards her and Wanda is knocked off her feet, rolling straight into the guardrail at the edge of the roof. She scrambles to her feet, spitting out specks of dirt and blood.

"Look at you," a silkily-voiced man greets her. He easily stands a foot taller than her and is bedecked in green and gold. Loki. "So much raw power. You had wondered, hadn't you, Doctor," he called in a carrying voice over his shoulder without taking his eyes off her. "Why such strange events were happening? Time distortions, power fluctuations, the very essense of the universe bunching and collapsing? Look no further. Someone's been having fun." He smiles at her, entirely without joy. 

"Give me the scepter, now," she commands, holding out her hand. 

He tilts his head, his gaze cold and calculating. She fights not to shiver. "Are you sure you want this to stop? Think of it. You could control everything. They would all bend to your will. Isn't that what you wanted? Isn't that why you did all this? I can see you, Wanda Maximoff. The stone in this scepter, it calls to you, as like calls to like."

She strikes out first, and they trade blows until she wrests the scepter away from his hands. She can feel the mind stone pulse in response to her powers, the powers it gave her. She thinks briefly of destroying it, but then Selvig is by her side, directing her to push it into the tesseract.

The beam disappears and the portal closes.

But the fight doesn't stop. 

(Much, much later she will find out that Thor, no longer distracted by the beam, stops the nuke, flying it far out to sea and sending it deep into the ocean. Wanda hardly even cares. All she remembers when she looks back is that moment when the portal disappeared and the day was won and the fight _kept going_.)

"Will you destroy me, too?" Loki laughs at her as she watches the Chitauri try to regroup. "Will you erase me? I saw into your heart. I saw your fear. What won't you give, to make sure the debt is paid?"

She turns on him and reaches out for the universe.

And the universe _doesn't respond_.

Loki is still laughing when she flees back down to the battle.

* * *

Three days later the last Chitauri is killed. The national guard arrived with help from the Candian army not long after the portal was closed, and with Thor's help the fighter jets were able to take down the Leviathans. Wanda had not been able to find Steve or Natasha again, but she has no doubt they will find her. People took to filming her as she fought, spreading her around Twitter, covered in alien guts and human blood and slinging out wave after wave of red energy. The Scarlet Witch, they're calling her. A savior.

A hero.

She stops watching the news after that.

Five days later Pietro has still only gotten about twenty hours of sleep total, all of them plagued with nightmares. He's preoccupied himself with the makeshift triage they've set up in Central Park, setting bones and retrieving shrapnel while Wanda stitches up cuts and scrapes. 

She patched up a dead man for an hour before someone pulled her away.

Now the twins are curled up on a cot in a small curtained off area, Wanda holding Pietro as he shivers and shakes his way through a nap. He is whimpering and crying, but no one comes to quiet him, because everyone else is, too. This whole place is awash with death. Wanda can feel it on her skin, and at the edges of her mind. The only thing that feels real is her brother's hair through her fingertips.

Suddenly a new presence, calmer and more focused, punches through the general aura of dull panic and misery and Wanda sits up, hands out, just as Natasha Romanov walks through the curtain.

"We've been looking for you for days, Miss Maximoff," is what the spy says to her, not looking affected at all by the red hand facing her. Over her shoulder she says "In here, Hill."

Maria Hill is next through the curtain. Her cold, beautiful features are sharp as she takes in the scene. "Wanda and...Pietro, I'm assuming?"

"How do you know?"

"Facial recognition is a hell of a thing," Maria says with a smirk. "You're all over the news. The government will be barking at your heels any day now. The savior of New York who can flip cars with her mind. Imagine the PR."

Wanda wraps her arm tighter around Pietro, feeling him beginning to slowly wake and mindlessly soothing him back to sleep, and draws her knees up. Makes herself a smaller target. Tries not to remember how Natasha, the woman right now watching her like a science experiment, used to smile at her. The spy catches the slip anyway, and her face softens as she comes to sit in the space Wanda's legs have vacated.

"What Agent Hill here is saying - badly - is that we'd like for you to come with us. We're apart of an organization called SHIELD. You've also met Steve Rogers, he's one of us too," Natasha says coaxingly. "We're like you. Special, different. We do things no one else can't. Fight the fights no one else can win. We'd like for you to help us." She reaches out and takes Wanda's hand, and seems to surprise herself doing so.

Wanda holds tightly, then pushes her away. "And if I don't come with you?"

The two women look at each other and Maria ever-so-slightly rolls her eyes. "Miss Maximoff, your face is on every major news station. Someone is going to come for you no matter what you do. I know that it's asking a lot to trust us, but-"

"I go nowhere without Pietro," Wanda warns, cutting her off. She can read between the lines, particularly ones as unsubtle as those. The army will come for her, ask her to work for them. For a moment she has to bury her face in her free hand to smother a hysterical smile. History repeats itself, always, it seems. Here she is, running from government control into the arms of the Avengers. Running from her mistakes.

"He's more than welcome to come," Natasha says softly, and Wanda nods into her palm. A card is placed onto the bed, with a name, number, and address. "We'll be there for the next week. I don't know if you're home - if it's still standing. But. Take your time."

They leave her then, with only Pietro's breathing and the cries of the injured drifting through the curtain. 

Carefully she reaches out. As far and as hard as she can. Feels for the grooves and waves and strands of the universe. But she feels nothing but cracks, jagged and sharp, jumbled together. She thinks of that moment with the tesseract, strings dying and falling away, cracks in the universe meeting and joining, and shakes.

It's too much. She can't change it. 

* * *

_"I've got no strings, so I have fun..."_

Wanda walks carefully to where Stark is sitting. The stars have disappeared, and the burning Earth beneath them has gone dark. The only light comes from the red at her hands and the red in Stark's eyes.

_"I'm not tied up to anyone..."_

"Am I dreaming?" She asks him, but he doesn't turn, keeping to his tuneless little song.

_"They've got strings, but you can see..."_

"Are you real?" She reaches out for him, running a finger along the dead strand of his place in space and time that's wrapped around his neck. It's cutting into his skin. Stark doesn't flinch.

_"There are no strings on me,"_ he finishes singing.

"You're not a nightmare," she whispers. "Are you."

"No," he says, quietly, looking out at the darkness. _"I've got strings but_ entre nous _: I'd cut my strings for you."_

"Please," she says. "Stop."

As she watches, Tony lifts one of his arms, a dozen erased futures, people, hanging from him in thin black threads. "What, you don't like irony?" he says, deadpan. 

"You can see them?" 

"Always have," Stark answers, running his fingers along the frayed edges. "Thought it was part of the nightmare at first. But it's real. I'm real, and so is this place, and so are these. And you did this to me, didn't you?" He drops his arm. "You've always wanted to hurt me. You never cared who else got in the way. So long as you're _happy_ , Wanda. You never answered me before. Are you happy now, Wanda? Was it worth it?"

"It has to be," Wanda tells him. "I can't go back. The universe, it's not - I pushed too hard."

"I know. It's fracturing. That's going around," Stark says, finally looking at her and she rears back at what she sees. There are cracks branching out from his eyes, and the same red glow that burns in them seeps through the spaces carved out of his face. He looks like a statue, beginning to crumble. "But you started this; you manipulated time and space. You can do anything. You just have to go back to the source. Everything that keeps breaking, its happening because the foundation itself is broken. But you can fix it, Wanda. Fix it, before it's too late."

"I can't." Pietro, she thinks, but also...

She doesn't want to let Stark go back. She doesn't want him to live that life where he was happy, and could smile, even as he tore everything around him apart. It isn't fair. It isn't fair. 

"You're the only one who can, Wanda," Stark whispers. "You've cut everyone else away, rearranged their insides to fit you better. The only one who can make it stop is you."

"It isn't fair," she says out loud, and Stark turns those red eyes back on her, eyes narrowing.

He leans into her, low so even if she ducks her head he can catch her eye. "You want to know something about yourself, Wanda? You once told Captain America that Ultron didn't know the difference between saving the world and destroying it. Where did he get that from, you wondered, and you meant me, because he came from me. But you always conveniently forgot something, so I want to remind you: Ultron came from you, too."

* * *

When Wanda wakes up, Natasha Romanov is at the computer in their small safehouse in Harlem, singing softly under her breath.

_"I had strings, but now I'm free; there are no strings on me."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, just to document changes: Wanda's messing with time and space rapidly moved up the timeline, but the Avengers plot line is still essentially the same. Only Steve is just recently woken, Stark isn't there to stabilize the destroyed engine of the helicarrier or pep talk Bruce, or figure out where Loki is going, and the Avengers are basically a mess. With the helicarrier gone though, the nuke takes much longer to be deployed.
> 
> Also, I always found the supposed death toll of the Battle of New York to be weirdly low, considering those Leviathans were just willy-nilly running into buildings and people were evacuating down onto the streets where HUNDRED OF CHITAURI were just waiting for them. Against like, six Avengers. I imagine without Hulk or Iron Man it would be much worse.


	5. This Peculiarity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The universe is your little broken clockwork toy, and I was a spanner in the works, so you took me out. Only, you aren't very good at this, Wanda. The gears kept moving, the clock keeps ticking, but I wasn't a spanner. None of us were. Cascading system failure. The center cannot hold."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is actually two chapters split into one, which is part of the reason it's taking so long. This was just supposed to be a one-shot, originally! Just got away from me.  
> Takes place from 2012 to 2013. TW for Steve being slightly suicidal.

_“Moral wounds have this peculiarity - they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.”_

* * *

There's a celebration for them, the heroes of New York.

Steve vacillates wildly from one hour to the next between seeing its purpose and finding the whole thing darkly hilarious. "People like to have a symbol. Gives them something to pin their hopes on," he explains to the twins, and he looks so tired when he says it, every year spent into the ice seeping into his stance, weighing him down.

The next hour he'll be lighter, laughing, for all the wrong reasons. "Heroes? I bet everything does look nice from way up there," he'll spit, glancing up at the helicopters circling the city, their blades beating through the smoke that's still rising from some buildings.

Cut him some slack, Natasha says when Pietro's face goes tight. He's been through a lot. He was in the ice for nearly seventy years, sacrificed himself to save New York. We woke him up just in time for him to see half of it destroyed.

The helicarrier crashed, they learn sometime in the interim. An agent under the influence of Loki - Natasha doesn't say who, but Wanda suspects it was Clint - took out the engines and they weren't able to save it in time. Sixty-five agents died, Thor was ejected, and Bruce Banner escaped. Meanwhile, nobody knew where Loki was until somebody turned on a radio to hear about the attack on New York City.

"What will you do now?" Pietro asks Maria Hill, who has been working at a computer 39 of the 52 hours they have been here in this safehouse.

She merely shrugs. "Same thing as everybody else. Rebuild."

They all keep their distance from each other. Wanda wants to be closer, wants it to be like it was, but this Steve is so distant and lost and angry, and Natasha is endlessly distracted, and Pietro stares at everything like he is a ghost in this world made momentarily solid.

No one says the word 'Avenger.'

* * *

They are not the only heroes of the day. When the ceremony is had, a long list of Air Force pilots are in the line-up. Men and women who risked their lives to take down the Leviathans. Thor makes an appearance from wherever SHIELD has been hiding Loki to shake each of their hands, calling them his 'shield brothers and sisters.' For the rest of them, they receive a respectful nod and nothing more, and Wanda wonders what else happened on that helicarrier.

Most of the soldiers are awed at meeting the actual Captain America, who is wearing his uniform from the Smithsonian specifically for today. It arrived just this morning, and Steve took one look at it before retreating to his tiny room for an hour. He wears it now with and the edges of resentment and panic and pressure cut in from his mind into Wanda's.

He looks heartened, though, to shake their hands, to thank them and welcome them. One such soldier comes by and claps him on the shoulder while they talk. "It's a great honor to meet you, Captain. I could hardly believe it when they told me you were alive. You've aged well." Wanda stiffens, recognizing that voice.

Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes is younger than she has ever seen him, even though his face is lined with exhaustion at the moment. Steve stares at him for a very long moment, and Wanda feels Natasha shift beside her to intervene if necessary, but then Steve surprises them all: he laughs.

"What can I say? Good genes, I guess," he chuckles. "James Rhodes, huh? Steve Rogers. The honor is all mine." They grin and laugh some more and for a moment it is her old life, in the compound late at night, and Rhodey and Steve are swapping stories of all the different pranks they pulled during the war. "May I introduce you to the rest of the team? Natasha Romanov, the Black Widow."

"I think that one's self-explanatory," Rhodes says with one eyebrow raised, shaking a smirking Natasha's hand.

"Thor, from Asgard."

"We met. Kinda. I was the dude shouting at you to pull left."

Thor nods. "Then I owe you thanks for sparing me the indignity of running into a building."

"And Wanda Maximoff. I think she's pretty much accepted the media calling her the Scarlet Witch," Steve finishes, and Wanda steps forward to take Rhodes' hand.

"Could be worse. My call sign was Boomer for the longest time. Boomer," Rhodes shakes his head, stepping forward into Wanda's grip. "Like a dog. Personally, I was fond of War Machi-" he breaks off suddenly, mouth hanging open, staring at Wanda.

Natasha leans into their space a little. "Colonel?"

Rhodes' mouth snaps shut. "War Machine," he finally says, releasing Wanda as if she'd burned him. "But that sounds a little silly as well."

"I like it," Wanda offers, but he doesn't look at her again, or any of them, stepping back into the line and allowing another to step forward.

Wanda cannot forget that moment, though, or the tiny, brief glimmer of shock and betrayal in Rhodey's eyes.

* * *

They send Thor with Loki and the Tesseract back to Asgard and then they are taken them to Washington, DC, to a place called the Triskelion. Steve stares out the window as New York City, all smoke and struts, disappears in the rear view mirror. 

"So this is the Scarlet Witch I've heard so much about," is the first thing Nick Fury says to her. He looks her over, his one good eye cold and clinical, then jerks his head to the left. "Romanov will get you and your brother set up ASAP. Tomorrow we'll begin briefing."

At first Natasha tries to set them up in different rooms, but when the twins protest she lets them take on of the doubles equipped with a bunkbed. Wanda very firmly does not think of her room in the compound, the pictures that Stark had helped her scrounge up from the recesses of the internet or the guitar or the down comforter. She sits atop the upper bed and convinces herself that this is enough.

"Are we the only ones there are?" she asks Natasha before the spy leaves the room. "You and the Captain and me?"

Natasha actually hesitates. "A lot of people were hurt when the helicarrier went down. If we're lucky, they'll be back soon." _And if we're not_ , Wanda wants to ask, feeling Clint's absence keenly.

(In the back of her mind, she strikes out once, twice, but the universe is as frozen as ever, shivering violently at the slightest probe. She doesn't try again.)

Pietro has not spoken since they left New York.

"Are you alright?" she asks him, and he throws his duffel on the bed with a sort of violence she thinks is unwarranted at the question.

"I have watched my home be destroyed for the second time," he answers dully, stretching out on his bed. "I have watched people die as I try to save them. And now I am dragged off to some secret government facility to do God knows what for God knows who. I am fine, sister."

"We didn't have to-"

"Didn't we?" Pietro snaps. "You decided. You decide everything, Wanda."

_You've cut everyone else away, rearranged their insides to fit you better._

Pietro dreams screaming that night. Down the hall, she can hear Steve doing the same.

Wanda dreams of nothing, and doesn't know which is worse.

* * *

Wanda begins building her Wall again in hers and Pietro's room, placing her supplies on the bottom bunk that Pietro doesn't use anymore, preferring to spend his time in the labs, absorbing all that he can now that NYU is gone and he can no longer go to school. He's avoiding her, and Wanda has never felt so lost.

She chases down every odd story she can find, prints them out and sticks them to her wall, but nothing seems to connect. The red string lies useless on her bedside table. A city in Nepal has begun experiencing time distortions, while across Europe there are stories of strange portals appearing and then disappearing in the blink of an eye. A small town in Canada vanishes from satellite for five seconds only to show back up, measuring one degree to the left. In the Triskelion itself, the Mind Stone pulses against her mind, warping everything around it. People in the building have started reporting strange visions when they sleep.

In New York, a phenomenon has risen. 'The Red Robot' reads like a conspiracy theory, a bunch of paranoid New Yorkers who swear that they saw a red and gold robot flying through the city with a bomb on his back. It reaches some national exposure, FOXNews running a late night special wondering if the government did in fact set a bomb on Manhattan and later regretted their decision, recalling the bomb with some kind of drone. Others swear they saw the Red Robot in the neighborhood, fighting the aliens.

Still worse are the New Yorkers who swear that sometimes they see their relatives or friends who were victims of the attack out of the corner of their eyes, or they see whole buildings still standing in the hulking, smoking rubble. _"I dream about him all night,"_ one woman sobs about her husband. _"And I see him all the time. I don't know what's real and what's not anymore. I just want him back."_

There is a newscaster, a pretty young woman who's partner was lost when a Chitauri flier took out his helicopter while he was reporting. She's on leave now, but the video of her breaking down on camera, crying that _"It's not supposed to be this way!"_ has over two millions views on YouTube.

Obadiah Stane continues to live a charmed life in California, meeting with businessmen and hosting parties and smiling, always smiling. His deal with AIM apparently proves lucrative, the two forming a partnership. She sees boxes emblazoned with both their logos in one of the Triskelion's supply rooms.

"We deal with Stark Industries?" she asks Natasha, and though her angry tone earns her a long side glance, Natasha answers readily enough.

"SHIELD has been in partnership with Stark since its inception - they were both partly founded by the same man. When Howard Stark died, Stane was happy to pick up the slack. Quality's never been the same, but it's better than Baintronics or Hammertech." Natasha flourishes one of her pistols for emphasis; there are no Widow's Bites that Wanda has seen. "They've recently started delving into biotech. Artificial enhancements, steroids without the side-effects. SHIELDs going to be first in line once it gets past testing. With how things have been going, we need every advantage we can get."

Wanda chews her lips, wondering how to go about this. "Have you ever met Stane?"

"I have," the spy confirms, frowning a little. "He's your typical slimy American businessman. Comes by the 'Skelion sometimes, makes nice with Pierce. I don't know how Pierce doesn't douse the whole place in Lysol once he's gone."

"Will he come by soon?"

Natasha finally looks at Wanda, calculation in that green gaze. "Why the interest, Maximoff?"

Wanda shrugs. "I've been up close and personal with his tech a few times. I wanted to thank him."

* * *

They have her perform for them, little shows of power, and they watch her with hungry eyes. She can see inside their minds to the sickness within. HYDRA, she thinks, remembers Natasha mentioning something about the fall of SHIELD, remembers watching old footage of helicarriers crashing into DC.

There are no helicarriers now. Losing one seems to have scared SHIELD off for good. But all throughout the Triskelion there are minds that beat darkly against points of light, waiting, planning.

They send Natasha, Steve and herself out on missions under the name of STRIKE. "Squad Alpha," a man named Rumlow proudly tells her, and she keeps her distance from him. His mind is like an oil slick, like Baron Strucker but worse. He hides it better, even in his head.

He doesn't feel _bad_ like Strucker did. Rumlow is arrogant and obnoxious, with tendencies towards cruelty, but he isn't evil. He is simply loyal and true and devoted - to a horrible cause.

He is Steve, cast in shadow. 

"Cut one head off," Stark murmurs in her ear late at night. "And another takes its place."

 _Tear out its heart,_ Wanda dreams, and Stark laughs.

"It's all collapsing," he says, standing on his broken rock, red peaking from the cracks along his skin. He is breaking up more every day. Soon there will be nothing more to him; he will scatter into the stars, taking all those dead people and places and futures with him. "But sure, Wanda. Do a little more damage. Bend it until it breaks. Then maybe you'll finally get what you want."

_What do you want?_

She wakes up with the question on her lips.

_What do you want?_

"No more monsters," she whispers into the dark.

The next day she tracks down Fury, she drags in Steve and Natasha, she even convinces Pietro to come with her and hold her hand. She tells them about the darkness, HYDRA in their midst. She tells them that everything is breaking.

"You have to help me," she begs, and she doesn't know what she means anymore.

* * *

Fury decides to wait, play it safe, set Natasha and Hill on the other agents. Find those still loyal and keep them close at hand. Find those who aren't and keep them even closer.

She expected Steve to be the most vocal, to call for the fight right now. He had never engaged in stealth or underhanded tactics, never gone for hiding the knife behind his back when he could merely shove the shield into someone's face. It was one of the reasons she had admired him. He wasn't Tony Stark, all doublespeak and lies in the corners of his smiles. He drew a line in the sand and he stuck by it.

Now his mind seemed caught in some terrible loop of agony and anger. He was so angry, a kind she had never felt before. It almost hurt to be near him sometimes. He hated it here, and he hated himself for it. His mind was like stone over glass: trying so hard to be strong but fragile on the inside.

"Are you okay?" she asks him softly. They are above the training center, watching the rest of the STRIKE squad go through their drills. Rumlow is laughing at something Rollins is doing, and for a moment they just look like two normal men sharing a joke.

Steve is silent for a long time, and Wanda is content to let it lie, to leave and give him space. When he finally speaks, his voice is hushed.

"I steered that plane into the ground, you know? I promised the woman I loved a date, and I faked a laugh, and then I killed myself." He places a hand on the glass. "I knew it was worth it. To take down HYDRA? To get justice for Bucky and all those other men, to stop them from taking over the world, I would do anything. So it wasn't - I told myself that it wasn't so bad. That it would be okay.

"And then they woke me up. Shoved the shield in my hand and pointed me at an enemy. Sixty seven years. Everyone's dead, everything's different. This isn't my world anymore, but I fought anyway. I thought I was going to die, and I told myself again that it wasn't so bad. That it was worth it.

"But now. HYDRA might still be around. And I'm supposed to keep fighting when I don't - I mean, what was the point? What did I ever do? What did Bucky die for? All I have left is this, and it was given to me, it's not mine. I'd do it again, Wanda, I would, every time. But. I don't want to wake up again. I just want it to be over."

She wonders if Steve felt this way before, and she had always missed it. Always too busy leaning on him, letting him take care of everything. "I know it's hard. I can't even imagine how it must feel for you. But," she says, and Steve's face shutters. "But please don't leave us. We need you."

Steve doesn't look at her. He's not really looking at anything anymore, just staring through the glass, somewhere far away. "You can see into people's minds, right, Wanda? You can see their hopes and dreams. Their fears."

"Yes," she whispers.

"I have this dream," Steve begins. "Every night. There's a little boy trapped out in space, and when he sees me, he smiles. Hugs me. Thanks me for coming for him like I promised. He tells me that we need to get off the rock we're on, that we need to go home, and he needs my help. He has all these plans - he must be four or five, and he's so smart. He's going to build a ship and he's going to take us home. And I want to help him, I want to so badly, but I can't. I don't know how."

Wanda feels an icy hand wrap around her heart as he talks, picturing it perfectly. The little boy out in the stars, longing to come home. Sending his final distress call for anyone who will listen. "Do you wake up?"

Steve barks a laugh. "No. He builds the ship. He begs me to come with him, but I'm too afraid. He gets in, he lifts off and every time, every time, the ships explodes before he can make it home. I watch a little boy die, every night. Sometimes I try to stop him. Sometimes I even succeed for awhile. But I never get on the ship. You tell me, Wanda. What does that mean?"

She has no answers for him.  

Wanda doesn't know how to help him. They always relied on Sam for that before; he was the only person who knew how to talk to Steve when he got into his more melancholic moods. Sam knew how to give support without it seeming overt or in your face. Sam would know what to do.

She searches for him in SHIELD's database.

Samuel Thomas Wilson died in 2009 in a rescue mission in Bakhmala, Afghanistan.

The EXO-7 had never been invented.

* * *

"No!" Wanda screams, pounding her fists against the ground. The rock breaks beneath her, bright red flaring up between the cracks. _"NO!"_

"Well, that is a shame," Stark says, falsely sympathetic, running his fingers through the frayed strands that hang off his wrist. "I kinda liked Sam. He was a bit judgey, but I think that's a requirement for being friends with Cap. I wonder which one of these is him. Oh, I think it's this one. It gives off that patient vibe he had, you know, the one that always bordered on patronizing. Hm. On second thought, maybe I didn't like Sam."

"SHUT UP!" she yells at him, rising back to her feet, her hands lit up red. "Or so help me-"

"You'll what," Stark says to her, low, sharp, deadly. "What are you going to do to me? What can you do to me that you haven't _already done_?" His eyes are no longer brown now, just a dull red glow that casts eerie shadows on the rest of him. "You forget, Wanda. Sam was _alive_ on our world. A little worse for wear, but alive. I didn't do this to him. You did."

 _Sam_ , she mourns. She can't remember him, she realizes with panic. She can't remember his voice, or his smile. It's been nearly twenty years since she's seen him. _Oh, God, Sam._

A knock on the door wakes her up, pulls her out, and she stumbles to open it, nearly sobbing out loud when she finds Pietro on the other side.

"I - I felt -" he says, reaching for her, cautious like he's never been.

She tilts forward into him, wrapping her arms around him. "Pietro, please," she begs, and he hugs her back before leading her inside. She knocks everything off the bottom bunk with a wave of her hand and they settle on the too-small mattress together, holding each other.

This could be enough. If she could just keep Pietro, maybe that could be enough.

Her brother murmurs nonsense to her, petting her hair, just like Mama used to. "I don't know how I'm supposed to do this," she tells him. "I don't know how to make it better." 

"Maybe you can't," Pietro says, and neither of them fall asleep.

In the morning light, Pietro stares at the wall, reads reports of the Red Robot, the anomalies happening across the world. "It might not be safe here for much longer," she tells him. Something is coming, she knows it. On the edge of her mind, darkness looms.

"I don't think it ever was," Pietro says.

* * *

They keep their heads low, and more shipments from Stark Industries appear. There are new guns on the ranges, new locks on the doors. Everywhere she looks there are Stane's fingerprints.

One day, the man himself accompanies one of the boxes.

She sees him in the lobby, escorted by a woman with long brown hair and a shaggy-haired, sharp-dressed man. Pierce himself comes out to greet them and they all shake hands and smile at each other.

Wanda's world goes red at that smile. Her parents' killer is here, right in front of her. She reaches out, both hands, to rip and tear, to take him molecule by molecule, string by string, and take him apart, take him out, _no more monsters_ -

And she can't. The universe shudders as her powers ripple through it, _just one last change, just let me have this_ -

The cracks grow and grow-

And meet.

Wanda comes back to herself to find Stane gone, but the world unchanged. She didn't do it. She couldn't do it. The one chance she had at saving her world, her perfect world, where everything was even, where she never cried

never hurt

never grieved

never saw the things she saw-

Wanda screams and screams until the world goes black.

* * *

Stark says nothing. A dozen new strings dangle across his shoulders. They dig into the cracks in his skin. Will they hold him together, she wonders, when he falls apart?

Will she be one of them?

* * *

She wakes up in the infirmary. A TV is on in the corner, set to some news station, BREAKING NEWS splashed along the bottom. Pietro is sitting by her side. Aside from them, the room is empty.

(Don't think of who was there before. (You'd been an idiot. That's what he said, after her first mission out that had landed her in the hospital. 'You're an idiot. Super witchy powers alone do not a blast shield make.' He'd been right in the end, but from that point on you'd been determined to prove him wrong. Maybe that was the point.) Steve. Natasha. Clint.)

(Sam. Vision. Rhodes.)

(Tony.)

("You're an idiot," Stark told her. Thrown down a pad of paper and a pencil. "Super witchy powers alone do not a blast shield make. Shit, Sabrina, my armor would have trouble with that, never mind this last gen stuff you've been wandering around in. You're getting bulletproof armor. Draw what you like. I'll even put some gliders in the coat this time.")

Pietro is enough. Pietro has always been enough. All she ever had; all she ever wanted to.

But Pietro turns to her now with dark eyes, lips pressed tightly together. "Are you feeling alright?" he asks, but there is no feeling to his voice.

"I think so," she answers. Her throat aches. "I don't know what happened. How long was I out?"

"Awhile." Pietro plays with her fingers, one by one, staring at them with a new sort of wariness in his gaze. "You shattered all the windows in the lobby. I think Pierce was actually impressed, when everyone wasn't squawking about how out of control you were."

"Stane-" Wanda begins, then pauses. "I saw him. In the lobby. I - got angry."

Pietro shrugs, one shouldered. "Understandable. He sold the bombs that killed our parents. I know why you want to hurt him. It won't bring out parents back, but you'll feel better, won't you." He looks over at the TV, a quick glance, and then his head drops again. "He can't hurt anyone else, if he's gone."

"I couldn't do it," Wanda whispers, ashamed.

"I know," Pietro says flatly. "I woke up this morning and the world spun on. Nothing changed." Something in his face grows tight, an almost angry set to his brow, and Wanda feels an inexplicable trickle of fear creeping down her spine.

"Pietro?"

"You know those stories you've printed out?" he interrupts her, switching topics rapidly. "Those people in New York, or the ones in Afghanistan. They said they dream of a different life. Ones where their families and friends are alive." He clenches his hand around hers, then lets go. "Do any of them ever dream that they were dead?"

Wanda murmurs his name again through numb lips. He looks so small, so lost. His hair is like hers, dark and wavy. Like their mothers. It went white from shock and trauma before. He was bigger before, taller, more muscled; he lived a harder life, always running.

"Wanda," he says miserably. She has never heard him say her name like that in any lifetime. He looks toward the television again. "What have you done?"

New York City is on the news. The portal has torn open again.

* * *

She thinks maybe she sleeps again. Or maybe Stark is here in the infirmary with her, watching the TV. Maybe she's hallucinating. Maybe its all falling apart.

"I never knew we were so much alike, you know?" Stark says, watching the helicopters circling the hole in the sky. "You kept talking about wanting to fix things. I'm an engineer before anything else, Maximoff, I know all about fixing things. Making them better, right? Technology, biology, the environment. People. Sometimes I see them like machines. All the little moving parts and gears that make them tick.

"And that's you." He turns to her. "And this. The universe is your little broken clockwork toy, and I was a spanner in the works, so you took me out. Only, you aren't very good at this, Wanda. The gears kept moving, the clock keeps ticking, but I wasn't a spanner. None of us were. Cascading system failure. The center cannot hold. What am I - what am I talking about, again?" He looks at his hands, the minute trembling of his fingers throwing red shadows shimmering over everything. 

"Tony," she murmurs, and when she blinks again, he is gone. Before she can say whatever it is she wanted to.

(She thinks it might have been 'forgive me.')

* * *

There is a woman set up in the labs right off the infirmary, the same woman who came in with Stane. She is dressed now in a white lab coat, examining vials of some red-orange liquid. The stimulants Natasha mentioned, Wanda would hazard as a guess.

"Hello," the woman says when she notices Wanda staring. "Can I help you?"

Wanda is still a little weak, being held up by Pietro, but Fury needs all hands on deck now that SHIELD is scrambling to re-seal the hole in the sky, the hole that is growing. She told him first thing when he came to visit to move the scepter, and he told her it was already done, the only bright spot in this mess. In this mess, their plans to take down HYDRA from within have to be momentarily put on hold. 

"I didn't know we had a new doctor," Wanda says when she realizes they are both waiting for her to speak.

The woman smiles. She is pretty, in a nondescript way. Wanda's gaze wants to slide right past her. "Scientist. On loan, actually, but since most of the others here at SHIELD have been co-opted to fix the sky's new asshole, I think my stay here might be a little more permanent. Biochemistry," she waves around her with a grin. "Not much for the astrophysics."

"Nice to meet you," Pietro says.

"Likewise. You're Wanda Maximoff, aren't you?" The woman says to her, eyes gleaming with curiosity. "The news never says: were you born with those powers?"

"Yes," Wanda answers slowly. 

"Fascinating," the woman says. "I bet the guys down here are always begging after you for 'studies.' You tell them no, of course."

"Of course."

The woman points at her, her grin going a bit snide. " _Of course_. Take it from me: never give up to a man what you deserve credit for yourself. They won't even list you as a footnote." She leans forward, hand out, and Wanda leans forward to shake it. "Doctor Maya Hansen. I look forward to working with you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Tony is never there to stop Extremis...


	6. Tear Out My Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The strange thing, looking back, is that they could all see it coming for them. The pieces were all there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the other half of that chapter. There are two, maybe three chapters left. Mild warnings for Tony's mindstate rapidly devolving near the end of this chapter.

_"“Fool that I am," said he,"that I did not tear out my heart the day I resolved to revenge myself"."_

* * *

 "It's like this," Stark says, tracing lines in the sand scattered sparsely over the rocks. The moon is gone here, the earth a blackened husks. The only light comes from Stark, a broken red glow cast over the terrain and Wanda and the figure he's drawing.

It's two lines, spiraling around each other like DNA. Stark draws lines in between the spirals, holding them together. "You," he says, pointing to her, and with one hand he erases one of the connecting lines. "And maybe - maybe that wouldn't be so bad," Stark continues quietly. "Maybe everything could have been okay. But imagine that line was marked C. You haven't just erased one C now, you've erased all of them."

He goes through, smoothing out this line and that, until the two strands are held together by a handful of threads. "Things fall apart," Stark says, at goes to the end of his drawing, the end of the two spirals. With two fingers, bleeding scarlet over the ground, he makes the two lines diverge away from each other, nothing connecting them. The image stays in Wanda's mind long after she wakes up.

* * *

One points six inches.

Every day, the breach in the sky grows by one point six inches. In a week, it will grow eleven point two inches wider. In a month, it will grow almost four feet wider. In a year, almost twenty four feet.

On the news, the math is very exact. Every day there is a new physicist or engineer or mathematician with new, enlightening graphs explaining how the hole is affecting our gravity, our ozone layer, what will happen if the growth is exponential instead of fixed, what will happen if it grows too big, what will happen? What will happen to us?

They do everything but explain how it reopened.

Pietro knows, though.

She finds her brother in their room more than once in the days following her breakdown, staring at the Wall.

Pietro knows a lot.

She take the Wall down. She can't stand to add to it anymore, can't stand to search for everything that is going wrong. She doesn't have to hunt it down anymore; it's right there on the news for everyone to see.

* * *

The portal reopening sends SHIELD scrambling, and even Fury seems to be running ragged staying on top of all their operations plus monitoring for HYDRA interference. They send their own agents to help monitor the portal with the Air Force that seems permanently stationed at the portal nowadays, ready and waiting for anything to come through.

Wanda knows it can't be long. The Chitauri weren't destroyed like they were last time, merely cut off. The chances that they are still in that quadrant of space, or worse, that something even worse is, is too high. When she mentions this to Fury, he scowls.

"Oh, we know. Why do you think New York City's allowed armed jets to hang over their city all day? We know, and there's nothing we can do but wait."

Waiting is the new normal. They wait, and they watch.

There are people in and out of SHIELD all day, many that none of them, not even Natasha, recognizes. It makes them all nervous.

"We're sitting ducks here," Steve says one day when they meet in one of the security rooms. They gravitate around each other nowadays, not for companionship but out of necessity. They are the only ones they can trust, and even then, Steve and Natasha's minds are sharp-edged against her own, lined with suspicion and fear. They are fighting it so hard, a thousand internal battles each day, and they are losing. She misses Clint. She misses Sam. She misses her home. "We need to leave."

"And go where?" Natasha asks. "There's nobody for Fury to turn to, and unless you've got some old World War II buddy with a bunker hidden up your sleeve, anywhere we go we'll be outgunned in seconds."

"Fury must have somewhere," Steve says.

Natasha shakes her head, her green eyes dark and shuttered. "That's a last resort, Rogers. We go underground, we lose every chance we have at knowing what the enemy is up to. We start running now, we'll never stop."

"And here I thought hiding was what you people did," Steve snaps, and with dismay Wanda realizes that they're not debating, or discussing, they're _fighting_ about this. Steve and Natasha had always been the Dad and Mom of the team, always at each other's back. Natasha had turned on Stark to help Steve. Now they glare at each other balefully, stress lines at Steve's eyes and that minute twitch of the mouth that means Natasha is truly upset.

"We do a lot of things," Natasha says tersely. "All of them require patience."

Steve holds her gaze for one cold moment, then drops them to his feet, breathing out a sigh. "I'm gonna take a walk."

Pietro stands. "I will come with you. I was due in the labs an hour ago. Dr. Hansen is expecting me. Be safe, sister. Romanov." He doesn't wait for any of their replies, merely stands and walks out of the room. Steve follows a few seconds later, and the room grows quiet.

"Are you alright?" Wanda ventures softly when the silence grows too thick. Natasha doesn't take her eyes of the security screens, gaze going from one to the other after a brief pause at each, but she tilts her head a little in Wanda's direction.

"Fine."

Wanda sighs. "You are not."

"You've been told to stay out of our heads, Maximoff," Natasha says, her voice not changing pitch or tone but warning nonetheless.

"I don't need to read your mind to see you are...uneasy."

Natasha's eyes flick down to the bottom row of screens, which show the lower level labs. Maya Hansen is busy at work at her microscope, jotting down notes every few seconds. Pietro says she's a genius; true or not, she is devoted to her work. She almost never leaves her labs, always on call for the various agents and employees of SHIELD who head down there.

"Something's not right," Natasha murmurs, her eyes lingering on Dr. Hansen. Wanda's eyes remain as well. Any moment, Pietro should show up on screen. Natasha keeps talking, though, her voice sounding distant. "All of this. It isn't right. It's not how it should be."

She's begun drawing idly at her notebook she keeps with her at all times in this room, marking down suspicious activity for Fury. A little red ledger. Now, over today's list of names, Natasha draws first one zig-zagging line, then another straight over it. At the bottom, they straighten until they are parallel. They do not meet again.

"What is that?" Wanda says, not even recognizing her own fearful, stressed voice. Natasha looks at her, then looks down, and frowns.

"I don't know," she admits. "Seems familiar though. I think I-" Her mouth snaps shut, suspicion ringing loud in her head as she glances at Wanda again. _Why?_ The question is so sharp, so clear, so common in Natasha's head whenever she's around Wanda. _Why?_

Natasha shrugs. "Bored, I guess."

Wanda stares at Stark's drawing, black and fresh in the real world, and can't breathe. Natasha turn back to the screens, her gaze now wandering by the screen where Maya Hansen's is shown still to be working at that same microscope. Neither notices that on the recording, Pietro never once shows up.

* * *

Pierce says "We're spread too thin, here, Nick. I have to bring new agents in."

New agents come in to replace the ones that are now permanently stationed at the Rift. They get their blood work done down at the lab.

(Some of them don't come back up.)

Pierce says "We need to be prepared, Nick. We need SHIELD operatives on the ground and ready."

SHIELD spreads. New York City, Los Angeles, London, Hong Kong. 

(Another heads sprouts.)

Steve says "We need to leave," and at some point Natasha stops arguing with him. 

(At some point, Natasha starts agreeing.)

Pietro says "Dr. Hansen has stopped allowing me down in the labs."

(He doesn't say that he's scared. But he is. They all are. 

Even her.)

* * *

The news reports on Obadiah Stane's new venture with the military. Higher grade weaponry to take on the alien threat to be installed in all military equipment posthaste. 

A message comes through for SHIELD on a private channel, encoded, and sent directly to Natasha. " **SOS** ," it reads. " **NEW STARK MAY BE RIGGED**." There's no way to reply to it, no way to verify it, but Natasha seems to trust it.

"It's from someone who could have been a friend," she says even as they watch her delete it. "Once upon a time."

They are surrounded by unfamiliar faces, unfamiliar minds, unfriendly, unwelcoming. They are surrounded by Stark tech everywhere they turn. Maya Hansen won't allow Pietro down into the labs. 

What will happen to us? the news asks. 

(Stark says "It's like this" and draws a symbol in the dirt. He's starting to crack at the edges. He's starting to blend in with the stars.)

* * *

On a Monday night, the ticker at the bottom of CNN reminds people about the platoon of soldiers, Air Force and Army, that has gone missing in the Middle East. The ticker reminds audiences that this isn't the first squad to go missing recently. The primary suspect is a terrorist organization known as the Ten Rings, but so far there have been no bodies. Which is strange, but nobody quite knows why. There should be bodies.

Wanda is paying attention to the video shown on screen, a heartwarming show and tell of New Yorkers keeping their chins up in these trying times. They're hosting barbecues and neighborhood-wide picnics. They're opening up their homes and their schools. "We all might die tomorrow," one person says, grimly cheerful. "It puts a lot of things in perspective."

They're painting a mural, now, on one of the blank walls not facing a street. The names and faces of the lost, the things they love most about New York, and one strange drawing scattered around, repeating over and over.

A helix, unwinding.

* * *

On Tuesday, the President is assassinated. 

Any soldiers that may be missing are forgotten. For a whole day, even the hole in the sky is forgotten as the world reels and America scrambles and a new man is sworn into office.

"Matthew Ellis was a hero, a patriot, a man both of peace and of war," the former Vice President Richard Rodriguez, now the most powerful man in the world, says solemnly in an address to the country from some undisclosed location. "He knew both when to wield the sword, and when to rely on his shield. I can only hope to follow his example, and like him, so set an example for the rest of the country. In these troubling times, I urge Americans to stay strong, stay together, and look to their elected leaders to guide them through. Good night, America, and God bless."

At the funeral three days later, President Rodriguez stands with Ellis' widow and children, walking hand in hand with his daughter. The new idly notes that her new prosthesis works like a miracle; you can't even tell where her real leg ends and the plastic begins.

"Stark tech," one of the commentators replies. "Their new research with AIM, if I'm not mistaken. Because of them she's able to walk beside her father and keep him standing tall as he lays his long time friend to rest. It's amazing that even on a day like this, we can find hope for the future."

* * *

There's an investigation, of course. No one knows who the killer might be, but tensions are already running so high people see shadows in every corner. The number of jets and helicopters stationed by the portal grows every day, even as investigations are conducted into the military, the Department of Justice, of Defense.  

A new message, a different channel. " **EXPERIMENTS** ," it reads. " **PROJECT MIA. CALLED EXTREMIS**." Natasha can just barely decode them before the messages disappear. They eat themselves. Whoever the messages are from, they are well-versed in running scared. " **SUBJECTS FROM ARRESTS. MISSING SOLDIERS. MIA. MIA.** "

The investigation turns on SHIELD. Sharon Carter disappears. Then Maria Hill. Everybody Fury ever thought might fight on their behalf goes missing one by one.

"MIA," Natasha mutters as they huddle together in the security room. She was interrogated just yesterday; they'll need to leave soon, but they don't know where they can go, or who they can trust. Wanda isn't sure that Steve will come with them, but she knows they can't separate. "MIA."

Steve is staring at the table. He's been tracing the double helix on its surface. "Missing in action," he says, almost to himself, and the whole room freezes.

"The missing soldiers-" Pietro says, sitting up, reaching for the computer, but Natasha is already typing.

There, one after another, buried under encryption, a list of names. Air Force, Army, Marines, government agents, SHIELD, SWAT, black ops. 

MIA. MIA. MIA.

Natasha scrolls past one name and Wanda's heart clenches tightly in her chest.

_Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes. Missing in action._

* * *

" **RUN** ," the message reads. " **GET OUT NOW. AFTER CA'S BLOOD**."

Thaddeus Ross is on the news reporting the successful capture of known fugitive Bruce Banner. There is one more message waiting for them, the encryption only lasting long enough for a long string of words to take over the screen.

" **CODE GREEN** ," it says. And then, repeating over and over until it takes up the screen. " **AVENGE ME. AVENGE ME. AVENGE ME.** "

There are no more messages.

* * *

The strange thing, looking back, is that they could all see it coming for them. The pieces were all there. 

Before, Steve took down HYDRA with a Natasha, Fury, Sam, and a fistful of moxie. Back then, though, he had been a different Steve. Back then, he had a reason to fight. There is no Winter Soldier to unmask here, and Natasha cannot be counted on to have his back and Sam is- Sam is- (Sam isn't.)

This Steve will pick up his shield and keep fighting until it kills him. Maybe because it will kill him. 

Now, they are paranoid, suspicious of everyone, and blocked in on all sides. They are not a team, they are a-

_Timebomb._

It starts on a Friday. One of the jets explode near the portal, then another. New York cowers in fear that the Chitauri are coming for them again, and sure enough pieces of Chitauri fliers are found in the wreckage that crashes down in Central Park. Martial law is opposed on the city, in the event of a future attack. The jets are replaced with newer models, top of the line Stark tech equipped and ready, by Sunday afternoon. The citizens make some fuss, but are mostly content with the new changes, the evacuation drills that have been drawn up, the soldiers on the street.

Natasha goes through the clips they show frame by frame. Soldiers' faces flash by, hidden under helmets and protective goggles, burdened down by pounds and pounds of tactical gear, but facial recognition can do a lot with little.

"Tobias Parker." MIA.

"Zachary Barker." MIA.

"Melissa Obrecht." MIA.

Line after line through names of soldiers that have gone missing here in the States or overseas, now very much alive and unharmed in New York City, patrolling the streets. "Why are they here? Where did they go?" Pietro asks as they pour over the lists.

"HYDRA," Steve snarls. "It always comes back to them."

It spreads like an infection, more missing soldiers, more new SHIELD recruits in different cities every day. Wanda is surrounded by darkness on all sides, oily thoughts that spread all over the tiny pinpricks of light that are her and Pietro and Natasha and Steve, blotting them out.

They don't sleep, any of them. They all have terrible nightmares. There is a echo of falling in Steve's mind all the time, of water and ice and isolation. Natasha's is bare in a way that is unnatural. Natasha has a story and a script that she makes herself every morning, and every day she keeps to it faithfully. If she veers from it now, she might lose it all.

"We leave," Fury says. "Tomorrow."

Pietro's mind, always so close to hers, is screaming. She wants to reach out, to soothe on her best days and smother on her worst. She doesn't know who is more frightened, and she doesn't know who the fear belongs to anymore. This was supposed to be her perfect world, one where she never knew fear or pain, one where her brother lived by her side and held her hand and they never ran from anything because there was nothing to run _from_. Now they can't stop. Her beautiful big brother, always moving, always running, wasting away under her fingertips.

No more monsters, she had wished. She had never wanted this. "I'm sorry," she says one night into the darkness. Pietro's eyes are open under the hand she has wrapped over them, the old familiar position she used to hold him in to calm him down, but he says nothing.

The next day, SHIELD falls.

The doors lock down, the weapons won't fire. They are surrounded by Stark tech, in their phones and their comms and in the cameras. They're surrounded by HYDRA. They're one and the same, and they've been fools.

"I am sorry it had to come to this," Pierce says regretfully, holding up his hands so his men don't fire. Steve has his shield up, covering Natasha who is bleeding from a bullet wound to her shoulder. Fury can't seem to decide on a target, turning his gun from this agent to that, assessing and reassessing threats. "You know, we never wanted to hurt any of you. You've all been great assets to the cause. We were content to let you run around in your little maze, trailing after the clues. But then you decided to run. I can't say I'm not disappointed, Nick."

"The feeling's mutual," Fury growls, and Pierce sighs.

"SHIELD is going to help lead this world into a new era of peace," Pierce says, coaxing, conciliatory. "Hasn't that always been the name of the game? Freedom from fear. I think Peggy Carter wanted to put that on the letterhead at some point."

"Peggy would never stand for this!" Steve yells. A couple of safeties click around the room but Steve doesn't appear to notice. "You think this is freedom? You think any kind of freedom or peace can be gained by what you're doing right now? I've met men like you, selling evil in the name of prosperity but we all knew the truth; they were illusionists. It was all tricks and lies. We stopped them before and you can be damn sure we'll stop them again."

Pierce smiles. "At the risk of sounding cliche, Captain: you and what army?" He drops his hand, placing it in his pocket. The air is tinged with excitement and anxiety and bloodlust so thick that Wanda can taste it on her tongue. The minds around her, dark, angry things, press against her but she focuses on one. Pietro. She must keep Pietro safe. She won't let anything harm him again. She can't be the cause of his death, again. "Funny thing about peace. You dig down deep enough, to its core? You'll find violence. When history looks back at this moment, they won't see bodies. They'll see sacrifice. And they'll celebrate it. Gentlemen, ladies, it's been an honor. Boys, try to keep the Captain alive, please." He turns. Guns raise.

 _Pietro_ , she thinks. _If I can save just one person, let it be him._

Her hands fly out, her eyes go red, and she screams. Scarlet washes through the room, on and on, an endless wave, tearing soldiers and brick and concrete asunder. Pierce turns in time for her to catch his wide eyes before the wave catches him and he flies apart. _Pietro_ , she focuses, keeping him alive and safe behind her.

This is the only way she could ever save anything, she thinks desolately. Through destruction.

* * *

When her power runs out, she falls to her knees, her throat aching and her muscles burning. Pietro's arm is at her waist in the next moment and she nearly sobs. "You're alive," she says into his shoulder. "I thought I was going to lose you again. I couldn't-"

"We need to leave," a voice says to their left, and Wanda turns to find Natasha, Fury, and Steve still standing. Fury steps forward, his one eye on her and wide like she has never seen it. "Who know how many others are still here? Get to the basement and no matter what, don't look back."

They turn, intending to run, and Wanda does not think about how she is slipping in blood and on skin and body parts, when a groan cuts through the ringing silence. Curiosity gets them; they watch as a man, half his face smashed into an unrecognizable pulp, rises up to his knees then his feet. Bones crack and settle and the disturbing sound of flesh and bone popping back into place as before their eyes his injuries begin to disappear fills the air.

He is glowing orange.

"What-" Steve begins, but Natasha is already moving, dragging Pietro by the sleeve to the door.

"I think this might be Extremis," she's shouting as more and more rise to their feet. They get to the stairs and begin running, down, down. Explosions rock the building behind them, but they follow Fury's instructions. They don't turn around.

They run.

* * *

Wanda watches HYDRA take over the world from a small TV set that shows static more often than color as she huddles with her brother in a rundown shack in the Appalachians. SHIELD agents show up to investigate a bombing at the Chinese Theatre in California and never leave. In Tibet, strange, small vortexes that from all accounts seem to warp time have appeared in one of their busiest cities, and the world watches in fear as reports grow more numerous every day. They are being flung into chaos, and they cling to SHIELD to save them. Pierce may be gone, but his plan proceeds and all she can do is watch.

HYDRA poisons the world like a plague, and the universe shivers around her. She traces Stark's symbol into the dirt caking the floor. It's tearing. Breaking, like he said. The portal in the sky grows, and Tibet sinks into fear, and the world almost calmly falls to pieces.

She clings to Pietro harder than ever. She lets it be enough, for now, that she's saved him. 

In another room, Fury is manning the radio, sending deeply coded messages out for everyone. To anyone.

No one responds.

"Dr. Hansen," Pietro had said at some point, answering a question no one had asked. "She was always experimenting. People went down there and never came back. I think the message was about her."

"She came from AIM," Natasha remarks, then freezes. "AIM. MIA. Project Mia, I-" She looks lost for a moment, and small. She doesn't look like the confident woman who taught Wanda how to disarm someone in a fight.

Steve stands guard outside. He hasn't slept for days. He guards them, shield in hand, waiting for something to happen. Waiting for the fight. It's all he knows anymore.

"I'm not sure," Fury says softly at night. No one knows what he means, and no one asks to clarify.

 _Get up and fight_ , she wants to say, wants _Steve_ to say. _Didn't we used to do that? Weren't we heroes? "Y_ ou want to take them down?" she asks, and they turn to her.

"You know I do," Fury snaps, and Wanda glances at Pietro briefly before nodding.

 _"_ I know where we might start."

* * *

Stark is sitting on the ground, staring up at the stars. It's hard to read his expressions anymore through the cracks and the glow. "Stark?" she asks cautiously, and he startles badly, jumping to his feet with one hand raised.

"Wanda?" he asks, and the new quality to his voice, like water over rocks, sends shivers down her spin. The cracks aren't just growing, they're deepening. "Did you invade my head again?"

She frowns. "What?"

"Ok, I remember this, from the other time. But you're at the Compound right now. I left you there with Vision. Did you get out? Are you - you're doing it again, aren't you? Messing with my mind."

"Stark, what are you talking about?" she asks, something like panic bitter at the back of her throat. Tony tilts his head, his hands up placatingly, palms facing him in a gesture left over from long hours in the suit.

"I'm sorry I didn't call, there wasn't time. I know you're probably upset, and if you wanna yell at me I promise I'll stand there and take it, but Wanda, neither of us can be here right now. Ross is breathing down our necks. Do you know what he wants to do to Steve?"

Oh God. Oh God. He doesn't remember any of it. "No," Wanda whispers brokenly. Then louder, and louder. "No. No. _No_. Not you, too."

Stark's mouth quirks down and he steps closer. "Wanda, we can't stay here, okay? Just take us out and we'll sort it out. I'm not mad, alright? Steve, he said something, and I realize how it might of looked, like I was locking you up, but I swear-"

_"No."_

"I was just trying to protect you," Stark says, and Wanda feels tears run down her face.

She stumbles forward, grabbing onto his palm, tangling her fingers in the strands hanging off his fingers. "You can't do this. You can't leave me here, alone. You're the only one who knows. Tony, please."

"Wanda?" Stark asks worriedly, placing his hand on her shoulder. "I'm not going to let them hurt you, okay?"

"But you _did_ ," she sobs. It shocks her how much that still hurts her. "Don't you remember? You have to remember. I can't be the only one left. You let them lock me in a cell. They took away my powers. They took away everything, and you helped them."

"I did?" Stark asks, sounding disbelieving. Then, after a long pause, something shifts in him. His hands drop away from Wanda and he steps back. When he speaks again, his voice is much colder. Like ice breaking in the deep water. "Oh. Wanda. You're here."

She stares at him, sobs stuttering out in her chest, caught between relief and anger. "You - You - Was that - was any of that _real_?"

Stark rubs at his temple, and she watches red cracks splinter underneath his fingertips. "I'm...things get messed up. I don't always - I'm not always...who I am. Was; I don't know. Sometimes I can't remember. Then it all comes back and I-" He drops his hand, eyes on her. "I'm falling apart. Well, everything else is." He looks up at the sky and smiles a terrible red smile. "What's one more to add to the pile?"

He stares at her for a long moment. "So this is your brand of justice, huh? An eye for an eye. A cage for a cage." She flinches, having her own thoughts thrown in her face, looking at the result. "And now you're holding all the keys."

"I never wanted this," Wanda says, voice shaking.

 _"You did this!"_ Stark yells, and the universe _shakes_ along the timbre of his voice. She's forgotten what it felt like, to be scared of him, even as he's haunted her all these years, and her hands go up automatically. Stark's red gaze flickers down, and he starts laughing. "Go ahead, Wanda. Fix it. Make it better. _No more monsters_."

"I -" she whispers. "I don't want to hurt you. I don't want to hurt anyone else." Her hands power down and drop to her side loosely, like the limbs of a puppet cut from its strings. 

"What did you want, Wanda?" Stark's anger has passed as quickly as it had come; now he just sounds tired.

Her mouth wobbles between a smile and a sob from one moment to the next. "I wanted my family back. I wanted to be happy. I wanted all the things that everybody else seemed to get, and I always lost." Her mouth settles on a sob. "And I wanted you gone. Everything - it all seemed to start with you."

Stark laughs, not unkindly, but without any warmth. "Now it will end with me, too. You know, if it had worked? If everything had turned out okay, if your parents had lived and the world went on all gumdrops and roses, I would have been content. I always wanted a good death. But this-"

She looks at him. His skin is covered in cracks, lit from within by the red glow of her own powers, his eyes and the insides of his mouth and ears and nose shining out, and he is covered in dead, black strings, some of them rotting off of him in pieces. He looks more monster than man now, but in this one second, she is entirely unafraid of him for the very first time.

"This is the way the world ends," Stark chuckles. "I remember - I was here - I was so scared. Not with a bang, but with a whimper, and that sound was _me_." He shakes his head as if to dislodge something; she's losing him again. She wants to wake up. He doesn't look at her even as he keeps talking. "Don't let this be us. Cap said if we lose, we lose together, but that never worked. We win together. This is still your story, Wanda. You write the ending. Bang or whimper." He finally turns to her, and his look warps: leather jacket, sling on his arm, a bruise around his eye under the cracks. Her jailer from the RAFT. "I really am sorry, you know."

She wants to wake up.

* * *

She does, as the plane touches down in Novi Grad. "Welcome home, little sister," Pietro murmurs to her, nervous apprehension in his brain jangling uncomfortably against her own slowly heart rate. "There is really a base here?" He's asked her a dozen times, each reiteration bringing a new level of hurt into his expression at learning that HYDRA had taken root in their homeland and Wanda somehow  _knew_.

She hasn't saved anyone, she thinks. Not even him.

"Wanda." Pietro takes her hand. "Are you alright?" It feels like its been forever since he's looked at her like this, with no trace of suspicion or trepidation in his eyes.

Wanda sits up fully, watching Natasha land the plane. "I'm fine."

"You were talking in your sleep," Pietro says, brow furrowing.

"Was I?" Pietro nods and takes her hand in his, squeezes tight. He's warm, more real than anything she's felt in a long time. She squeezes back. "What did I say?"

Something in Pietro's eyes goes flat, and faraway. "You said 'I'm sorry, too.'"

She breathes out a little 'oh' as the plane finally comes to a stop. Steve and Natasha begin moving immediately, but the twins stay seated, hand in hand. "Sister," Pietro says, and his voice breaks on the word. "Whatever you may have done, or think you have done, just know that...I will always forgive you. No matter what."

Wanda feels tears well up in her eyes; this is what Stark can't understand. No one can understand what it is to have your heart ripped away, to have a vibrant, brilliant piece of your mind suddenly and violently go blank. She felt Pietro die ( _"it felt like this" and she crushes Ultron's core but it's not the same, it's not enough, it will never be enough because it won't bring him back_ ) and now he is here, and her mind is never quiet, and she is never alone. 

"You have to say that," she tells him. "You're my brother."

Pietro shrugs, mustering a small smile and wiping at her tears. "In my experience, there is very little that can't be forgiven. All it takes is some trying."

"So wise," she teases. 

"Well, I am twelve minutes older than you," Pietro snarks back. 

"Anything else, O Sage Master, or may we finally leave the plane?"

Pietro's smile does a funny thing then, going sweetly sad at the curve of it. "Just one. Before you embark on the path of forgiveness, you must first forgive yourself." Wanda's hand clenches spasmodically in his as in her chest her heart does the same. The world narrows down to the glint in Pietro's eyes: a bit of knowing, a bit of sadness, slashed through with fear and anger, all overshadowed with the warmth he has always given to her. Every different as he is, he's never stopped taking care of her. The moment breaks when Pietro's face crinkles with a slightly forced smile and wink. "I got those off of one of those fortune cookies!"

He finally stands and lends her a hand up. She takes it, the last real thing in her world of make-believe, and rises. "Let's save the world," he tells her, and even as she nods something drops cold in her stomach, and her hand slips out of his as he goes to help Natasha with a crate perched high.

Bang or whimper. Either way, she can't save him. She's killed him, all over again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not completely pleased with this, but the next chapter should be pretty big. We're not out of the dark yet, but Wanda's already taken her first few steps and she and Tony have done a little bit to clear the air, twenty years past due.
> 
> Some timeline notes: with the help of Stane, HYDRA spreads farther than ever, and with the help of AIM, they are resurrecting the super soldier program. If Tony doesn't foil Killian's plot (but he's also never there to motivate Killian to be better, which is why there is no real Killian-Mandarin here), Vice President Rodriguez' back room deals are never found out. With no new helicarriers, HYDRA uses a different plan than Project Oversight to start acting. The portal reopening is because the world is dangerously unstable due to Wanda's meddling and the Tesseract fighting back against her. 
> 
> As for Fury's delayed response: he's acting against a much larger group, with hands in even more pies, and he doesn't have A) Coulson or B) a Steve Rogers dedicated on saving Bucky Barnes.


	7. So I Must Die

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She thinks that once upon a time, this was all she wanted for her own grief. For Stark to know it, for Stark to see her pain and carry a part of it with him. She wanted him to hurt like she did. She didn't want to be alone. And now, her grief blankets his own, like it has covered everything else. Her grief created a whole new world, and it still couldn't be borne. It has consumed everything in its path, even her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Plot ahead. We're reaching the end-game here. Thanks so much to everyone who's been hanging in. I'm probably going to have to extend the chapter count by one more.

_“What I’ve loved most after you, is myself: that is, my dignity and that strength which made me superior to other men. That Strength was my life. You’ve broken it with a word, so I must die.”_

* * *

The HYDRA base that Baron Strucker once took Pietro, Wanda, and a dozen other Sokovians to in a past life is still standing in this world, just like she predicted. Still manned by HYDRA as well.

She remembers this battle from the other side, stalking Captain America and Tony Stark through the halls of the facility while Pietro wreaked havoc outside. She remembers the sheer joy she felt the moment her magic creeped into Stark's brain, the way she exulted at feeling him panic and fall apart as he imagined the death of everything he loved.

Now his pain is hers, and her eyes burn with regret and smoke as she helps Steve and Natasha take the base apart. Its a slow battle, even Wanda's power not making up for the loss of a god, an armed battle suit, and a Hulk that they had previously, but they get it done.

There is no von Strucker, however. No scepter, no mind stone. The only similarity is the presence of Doctor List. Wanda freezes when she sees his back as he flees from the ensuing attack, almost taking a bullet to the shoulder in her hesitation before she throws the HYDRA soldiers to one side with one sweep of her hand, running after him.

"Wanda!" Steve calls. "Stick together!" But Wanda has gone very far away in her own mind, slipping back into a person she doesn't prefer to remember, a naive little fool who let madmen strap herself and her twin to tables and feed cosmic energy into them until they screamed. List put her in that cell to build worlds out of wooden blocks, her entire existence narrowed down to a wash of scarlet and her ceaseless rage and the camera in the corner, always watching, _show us, Wanda, show me more_ -

He had oozed pride like an oil slick, never for her or her brother, but for himself. He had loomed so large in her previous life, even when she knew she could crush him with a wiggle of her finger. He had _made_ her, he and Strucker, broken her and melted her down and poured her into the mold he had hand-crafted.  

Now, in this world, Wanda has made herself, and List's mind is flat with fear as he cowers against the computer terminal she corners him against.

"I'll tell you everything," he says. "I swear it."

He looks so _small_.

"Is this the loyalty that HYDRA commands?" she asks, her lip curling, and List barks out a terrified, angry laugh.

"Loyalty? I was promised greater glory than SHIELD could ever provide me, and what was I given? Maya Hansen's cast-offs!" A chill ripples down her spine at the name and the hatred that skitters across the surface of List's thoughts. "But if you spare me, I will tell you everything I know?"

Wanda's red reach extends and List's eyes widen, whether at the glow of her eyes or her beatific smile she doesn't know. "There is no need."

She drags him along behind her telekinetically as they enter the secret room where the scepter was stored in the past life. For a moment she sees Stark standing there, unarmed but for the gauntlet on one hand, waiting for her to reach out and expose his deepest fears. Then she turns her head and he is gone, as is the rest of the memory. The basement is different, colder, lined with human-sized pods.

The pods are filthy, the insides covered in a red-black mucus that has frozen over into a hard crust. "What is this?" she whispers, but she doesn't need List's answer.

"Extremis," he confirms, spitting out the word like poison on his tongue. "Hansen's pet project; she sent the samples off to me like I was one of her lab rats." She touches one of the pods, feels the echo of pain and fear that still remains. The whole room is like an open wound. List keeps talking, the voice that once compelled her now razor sharp against her nerves. "They condemned me for _her_ failures. I have been betrayed, just like you. Spare me, and I will give you everything."

She pieces through his mind, finding places and people and pain. "Like I said," Wanda murmurs, lifting one red-ringed hand and sweeping it towards the wall. A loud thud echoes throughout the room as List's body follows her movement. "There's no need."

When Natasha finds her, Wanda looks at the blood smear at the wall, but not the body underneath. Natasha doesn't ask her to explain, but Wanda does anyway. "He forced my hand," she says, thinking of the day she met him, when he offered them the world and they took it, so hopeful for the future, so hungry for just a moment of power.

"He deserved it," she says, hearing Pietro's old screams in her mind beating against the fresh violence that still pours out of this room.

"I had no choice," she lies. Her eyes finally fall on the body. List's eyes are open, staring out at nothing, his mouth open in a shout he never got to voice. He looks so small, she thinks again.

For her, for Pietro, for the others he took, and for his new victims. She doesn't regret it.

* * *

"Where's Pietro?" she asks later on, when the base is cleared out. Pietro had been providing cover fire from a safe distance while they attacked, but Steve gave the all clear several minutes ago and she can't imagine her brother lingering. Natasha doesn't know, too busy scouring the information left in the computers, and Wanda sets out to search for him.

She finds him in the cells. In _his_ cell.

"Pietro," she says softly, watching him trace the wall as if he is searching for something. "We must leave soon." He ignores her, his hand suddenly clawing so he can run his nails down the wall in an arc, like he's tracing a pattern that isn't there anymore.

When he first got his powers he couldn't move at a normal speed. Every time he tried to take a step, he ended up across the room. Every reach he made, even the breaths he took were all at a speed too fast for the eye to catch. She used to hear him through the walls, colliding into the concrete, nursing broken fingers and feet from his restless movements while he slept. With his powers of speed came enhanced durability and stamina, or else the friction alone would have destroyed his body, but those first few weeks were still torture for him. She'd been no help, too lost inside the minds that filled the building, leaving her brother helpless, shouting for a sign that she was alright, clawing at the walls to get to her.

Eventually she had followed the bright sparks of her brother's pain back, far far down to her own mind. She had found her way back to him.

Now he seems as far away as he ever had then. 

"Pietro," she urges.

"I heard something," he says. "Someone. I heard them crying. But when I got here, it was empty."

"We have to go," she pleads. Pietro's hand digs into the wall. His nails scrape hard against the stone, the sound making her shiver.

His hand drops, the tips rubbed raw. "I thought I could help," he says. He turns jerkily, walking past her without looking up. "But I was too late."

* * *

They find Natasha and Steve back in the room filled with computer terminals. "There are HYDRA facilities around the globe," the spy says, tapping away as she sends the files off to Fury. "We'll start there."

"Cut off one head..." Pietro says, still shaking, but Natasha shrugs wearily.

"We have to do something."

Steve is in front of another computer, unmoving, staring at the screen. 'NEW SHIPMENT INCOMING,' it reads, and then a long list underneath. She thinks, for a moment, that it is from Hansen, detailing her new batch of Extremis for List to try out, until she sees that the list is full of names.

She'd seen some of those names before on a different list. _Missing in action._ The soldiers hadn't just been ambushed, or stumbled onto something they shouldn't have. They'd been led, followed the orders of people they trusted right up to death's doors. (Doors that she had once waltzed right up to, and came out the other side still alive and so, so proud. Hadn't she been special? Didn't this prove Pietro right? They were meant for this, and Stark was meant to suffer.)

She has to turn away, unable to watch Steve mourn the final destruction of everything he had once known.

* * *

So they follow the clues, from HYDRA base to HYDRA base. There's nothing they else they can do. Fury works tirelessly at the computers, trying to rouse anybody still loyal to what SHIELD was, as the news runs story after story of Stark Industries' new deals with the military, the negotiations President Rodriguez makes to send other countries aid in the form of soldiers and tech, the portal growing over New York and the jets that hover underneath it bearing a large 'SI' logo, the time warping in Nepal that nobody can explain.

HYDRA spreads across the globe and nobody makes a sound.

This is the way the world ends, Stark whispers at night, looking straight through her sometimes as if she is the ghost now.

There are the occasional protests, men and women disgruntled with the constant military presence. They gather at the courthouses and in the streets. Sometimes Wanda sees Stark's drawing on their signs, the unraveling helix held high. Did they dream it, too? Like the people who still dream of their dead relatives alive again, of the red and gold robot coming to save them, of air carriers that fell out of the sky one day?

( _It's a global phenomenon_ , late night hosts mock. _Laugh about it, that's the only thing we can do_ , is what they don't say. The audience plays along and pretends they don't see the fear in the host's eyes.)

"Where is the Mind Stone?" she asks Fury.

"With a friend."

"Are you sure?" she presses, and gets no reply. Fury fights harder than any of them, but he is fading, too.

* * *

"On your left!" Steve shouts to her, and his jaw slackens for a moment as his eyes unfocus. He nearly loses his arm to a grenade.

Or, Steve curses over the comm, words she's only heard him use once or twice, and Natasha says "Language!" in a tone Wanda has never heard from her in this lifetime before stumbling over nothing, looking all around her.

Or, they are in the thick of a fight, peeking out from cover and moving when they can, avoiding the brutally skilled sniper that is somewhere on the battlefield and who has already gotten Steve in the gut and Natasha in the shoulder. The battle is slow, and bloody, and ends with Wanda collapsing the base one column at a time until she reaches something that causes a huge explosion. As they piece through the rubble, taking out the HYDRA soldiers that still live because they can no longer afford mercy and searching for the remains of their computers, Wanda stumbles over a dead man, run through with a piece of metal, who had almost made his way out from underneath a ton of concrete block before succumbing to the wounds and burns scattered across his body.

His outstretched left arm is made of metal and adorned with a red star, and he is permanently caught reaching, trying, failing to survive. Wanda leans down, and closes his grey eyes, and tells Steve "all clear here" in a voice that fades on the wind.

* * *

They make it to a base near the border of Afghanistan. It is small, a re-appropriated outpost, and doesn't seem heavily guarded at first. Fury sends them in without a second thought, even choosing to fight with them this time while Pietro stays behind and mans the communications relay. 

The reason for the sparse guard becomes abundantly clear once the fighting begins however. There are only two kinds of people in this place: scientists, and Extremis recipients who managed to survive the procedure and have changed their loyalties. Fire and bullets spew out against Steve's shield and Wanda's barriers as they fight their way through, but even as a soldier gets knocked down, his bones broken and body riddled with bullets, he gets back up and continues fighting. 

They falter. There are burns snaking over Wanda's arms as she weakens and fire breaks through the red curtain she tries to maintain. She loses track of the others, retreats to a cold, dark room, holding the door with her powers while she tries to recover.

"Wanda," Pietro is saying over the comms, and she hisses some kind of reply, wincing at the pain.

There is a movement behind her, and she whirls, her free hand up, what little power she can spare flaring to life. The red light fills the room with a dim glow, and she finds eyes staring back at her, one pair dark and familiar.

"Rhodes," she breaths, and her control nearly slips.

James Rhodes is secured inside some kind of cooling chamber, metal strips at his neck, wrists, and ankles as a white mist is constantly pumped in all around him. But he seems completely alert, his gaze wide and baleful before they widen with recognition.

"I know you," he says hoarsely. She has to strain to hear him. "The girl from New York."

She approaches, heart breaking as he visibly fights down a flinch. "I am Wanda."

"You're late," he corrects.

"We're going to save you," she tells him, and he tilts his head back and laughs tiredly. 

"Could have used you two months ago," another man chimes from his pod, his eyes following her movements from his peripheral vision. 

"What happened?" she asks, flicking her hand to send her power this way and that.

Rhodey answers. "We heard about some other squads going missing. Wanted to investigate. Never-" She breaks the controls, and the glass begins sliding up. "Never leave a man behind. But I guess we asked too many questions. Saw too much. They sent us here. Injected us with - I don't know. It felt like fire. Most of us died."

She bends the neck brace and one arm strap away from him and he waves her away, freeing himself. The cooling mist continues to hiss but the room is getting hotter. "Some of us that lived agreed to work with these bastards," Rhodes says as he swings one fist at the glass covering one of his compatriots. It breaks easily and he tears at the restraints. "Those of us that didn't got locked up here. Told us we'd see the light."

They free the other men, seven in total. Rhodes walks to each man, a hand on their shoulder, a nod and a glance shared that she doesn't understand.

"Come with me," she says. There is banging on the door, the metal beginning to melt before their eyes. She can feel the fire and rage against her barrier; she doesn't know how long she can last. 

Rhodes turns to her last, and hesitantly reaches up to place a hand on her shoulder as well. It burns her, straight through her clothing, her skin beginning to scald in his grip, but she doesn't make a sound or move away. She stays, staring up at him, seeing the look in his eyes and refusing to recognize it.

"Come with me," she repeats, the words barely making it out.

Rhodes shakes his head. "We'll never make it."

"You don't know that."

"I do," he says firmly. "They kept us in cooling tanks for a reason. One wrong move, one bad thought, and boom. I've seen it happen. Simmons - good man, took out a good few of those bastards on the way." He shrugs. "It's not a bad death."

She shakes her head, but Rhodes keeps talking. "Listen to me - Wanda? We open that door, you run. And you don't stop running until you get out of here."

"I can't-" 

"You've still got that team of yours, right?" Rhodes asks over her. She nods. "These people, the things they talk about, what they're planning - it's insane. They want to rebuild the world in their image. They're playing God, and we're playing Sodom and Gomorrah. You have to stop it. You have to survive today so you can keep fighting."

Her shoulder burns. A fire has begun to glow in Rhodes' eyes, and in those of the men around him. They're running out of time.

"I'm sorry," is all she says.

"This is my job. Besides," Rhodes says with a brave smile. "I've got a good feeling about what's waiting for me on the other side." He lifts his hand, and she feels so cold. "Ready?" he shouts to the men around him, and they raise a ragged cheer. "Damn straight. Let's kick some ass."

She drops the barrier, and Rhodes surges around her. She runs and doesn't look back, not even when the building shudders around her, not even when heat explodes across her back, not until she's far away, the others panting at her side, and fire fills the night sky behind them.

(There's a burn on her shoulder in the shape of a hand, and Pietro reaches up, fingers covered in the ointment he's slathered on the rest of her injuries. She turns away and tells him to leave it.)

* * *

She dreams of fire, burning across the world, scorching the oceans dry and reducing everything in its path to ash. She dreams of the sky, blazing red, the air scalding her lungs and she tries to breathe, can't, choking, she's choking-

There is a hand wrapped around her throat.

"You," Stark snarls. She can still breathe, but his fingers are cold, and there is a whine in the air, heat against her carotid. He's wearing his armor, red shining through the seams. _"You killed him!"_

His fingers tighten, and her mind finally catches up. "Tony," she manages, and he tosses her aside, into a shelf of rock.

"You _let him die!_ " he shouts, and the dust trembles around her, the stars shiver, the universe quakes along the timbre of his voice. She has never seen him like this. She tries to back up, but there's nowhere to go. She tries to bring her hands up but the power there sparks uselessly. She has no control; she's scared. She's so scared.

There are tears streaking down Stark's face, seeping into the cracks in his skin. The red glow, always present with him now, pulses, first so dim she can scarcely see, then so bright it blinds her. "What have you done?" Stark shouts. "Why did you do that? Rhodey-" His voice breaks, and something breaks with him, something cracks somewhere deep. There is a string, newly shorn, hanging from one of his wrists. 

"I'm sorry," she sobs. 

The repulsors whine again as his hands raise, trained on her. "You're sorry. Sorry, you're so sorry," he says, and he is mindless with grief, and she's never seen him like this. She didn't know he could feel this. "Poor little Wanda, always so tragic, always so sorry, she didn't mean to _destroy everything_ -"

"I didn't!" 

 _"You just couldn't help yourself!"_ Tony screams. "It's never _your_ fault. You didn't choose to join HYDRA, you didn't choose to violate people's minds. You didn't choose to help Ultron. You didn't choose to put your best friend through ten levels of concrete, you didn't choose to fight your team knowing you might end up locked up! No!" He stalks towards her, palms up, and she wants to fight back, but her power reaches her fingertips and sparks away. "It was all me. And everything's perfect now. _No more monsters_."

He raises a gauntlet, repulsors firing up. "He _suffered,"_ Stark snarls. "You made him _suffer_. You killed Sam, you killed Barnes, you left Pepper and Happy and Harley and Peter with those _psychopaths_! You did all of this. Everything that is happening, everything that is going wrong, it is all _because of you_. Who’s going to save these people now, Wanda, this world you rescued from me? Who’s going to save them from you?" All she can see is the bright glow of his palms. He presses one to her forehead, repulsor flush against her skin. She should fight. She should scream. But she is so very tired. 

"Who’s going to be the one to _take the monster out?"_ Tony Stark asks, suddenly soft and all the more deadly for it, and the hum of the armor's power grows until it drowns out everything else. She closes her eyes.

The world goes quiet but for Stark's breathing. Inhale, exhale, rattling in his lungs, and then - nothing.

The heat of the repulsor disappears, and Wanda opens her eyes to see Stark step away, stumble and fall down. He crumples, his armor falling away until he is just a man, and sobs quietly into his hands. "Fuck. Fuck, fuck, I can't -" his voice breaks sharply. 

"I'm sorry," she says again, because it's all she can say. "I'm sorry." Her whispers drift, far far away, weightless. She doesn't know how long they stay there, how long it takes for his tears to run out. But she sits, and waits, and bears witness.

She thinks that once upon a time, this was all she wanted for her own grief. For Stark to know it, for Stark to see her pain and carry a part of it with him. She wanted him to hurt like she did. She didn't want to be alone. And now, her grief blankets his own, like it has covered everything else. Her grief created a whole new world, and it still couldn't be borne. It has consumed everything in its path, even her.

She thinks that once upon a time, she used to know who she was. (She thinks that was always a lie.)

* * *

When Pietro wakes her, the pillow beneath her is soaked and everyone is watching her carefully. "What is it?" she tries to ask her twin, but nothing comes out but a hoarse groan.

"I felt that," Natasha says, too sharp in the silence surrounding them. "I felt you." Steve is down below her makeshift cot wrapped in a used shock blanket, bandages already pulling away uselessly from his healed burns. His eyes glint in the darkness, suspiciously bright, looking anywhere but her.

"It was a bad night," Pietro says, defensive and more than she deserves. 

"I thought she had better control," the spy says. Her eyes are a bit too wide, her skin a bit too pale. Wanda has frightened her, she realizes suddenly. "We can't have our cover blown on long ops dealing with her leftovers."

 _Call them what they are_ , Wanda thinks. _Bloodstains. The kind that don't come out._  

"I'm sorry," Wanda says, because it's all she can say.

The next day, Natasha apologizes, genuine and exhausted, but Steve stops meeting her eyes when she looks for him. She wants to ask him sometimes, about the little boy he once dreamed of, if he ever made it off that rock, but she knows neither one of them want to know the answer to that.

* * *

Somewhere in southeast Asia, after they have successfully infiltrated one of the Ten Rings more far-flung associates, close partners with HYDRA that have been distributing Extremis to unknowing civilians, helpless farmers who are ignored and unseen, who nobody would notice went missing, when the sky fills with thunderous clouds.

Bolts of lightning flash, but never touch down, and a single beam of light pours from the heavens. They are all blinded for several moments but when their vision clears there stands Thor, wounded and shaking. He drops Mjolnir to the ground, then falls to one knee and for a moment, they watch him take deep gulping breaths.

"My-" he begins, wrapping a hand around the handle of the hammer. He makes an attempt to stare and suddenly Steve is moving forward, getting one shoulder under Thor's free arm. "Ah," Thor winces as he rises. "Many thanks, my friend."

"Thor," Fury greets, his voice just a smidgen too loud, startling everyone but Natasha and a weary Thor. "What brings you back to our realm?"

Thor's eyes are old when they rise to meet Fury's. "A grave threat," he rumbles, following Steve's lead when the captain begins to walk the bigger man towards their vehicle. Pietro is already arranging bandages. "One that will take all of our strength to combat."

"Well, that isn't precisely what it was when you left," Natasha tells him. When they try to ease him out of his armor, pieces of it break away in their hands. He is torn beneath, blood everywhere, and Pietro instructs them, place your hands here, and your hands here, and Wanda watches red seep sluggishly through her fingers numbly. 

"So I have heard," Thor says. "Heimdall had only time to give me a few warnings before he sent me through, but they were dire indeed. The many-headed serpent casts a shadow over us all."

"Why aren't you healing?" Steve asks stiffly.

"Wounds from the weapons of a Dark Elf do not mend easily," is Thor's slightly non-sensical answer. He is watching Steve and Natasha closely, and they all watch as he reaches up to close a hand around the crease of the latter's neck and shoulder. The blood he smears blends in with her hair. "I am glad to see you both well. It was a kindness I did not expect when I heard. But Heimdall told me you have continued the fight undaunted. It gives me hope."

Natasha catches his hand with hers, holds it there while Pietro lays stitches across Thor's body. "What happened to you?" she asks softly, and Thor's eyes slip close.

"I survived. I, alone," he answers after a long moment. His eyes open, a spark of lightning and thunder fading from them as he continues. "The last I saw of Asgard was its fall as Heimdall cast me through the Bifrost. It is closed now." He looks up to the sky, grip tightening on Mjolnir, but the sky has cleared away to a sunny blue, and blue it remains. "It is gone."

"I don't understand," Wanda says. Pietro has to pry her fingers away and she stands there letting the blood drip down to the ground. "Asgard is a - realm? It's a world. How can one whole world just disappear?" It's a foolish question to her own ears.

"It was eaten," Thor replies, his eyes landing on hers. "By the Aether. Infinite power given form. Like the Tesseract, and the Mind Stone."

"Someone used it against you?" Fury asks, but Thor shakes his head.

"No, it-" he stops, choking on a memory as his gaze goes distant. "It possessed a human form. Jane. My...my Jane," he says softly. "I thought I could protect her but the Aether - it was unraveling."

The word drops cold down her spine. 

"How?" She doesn't know who asks.

Thor curls in over himself. "It broke. There are no simpler terms. It pulled itself apart. It should have been impossible but - The Aether consumed Jane. It consumed my parents, my brother, Asgard. Everything. We were fighting to keep possession from the Dark Elves who pursued it's power, but in the end it bested us all."

They are silent, watching a being eons old struggle for control over his emotions. Wanda did not know who Jane was, but she had felt the flash of adoration and love when Thor mentioned her before it was ripped away by the tide of grief. "Thor," Steve says softly.

"No," the god says, shying away from a hand that isn't reaching for him. "I did not come to - I came to warn you, and to fight at your side. The same must not happen to Midgard. I will not let it."

"What's going to happen to us?" Pietro asks, snipping away the last strand and stepping back. Wanda steps close, wraps both her hands around one of his, and Thor's blood slides slick between their skin.

"Loki," Thor begins, then pauses to let them settle. "Warned me of a being. A mad titan who calls himself Thanos, on a quest to hunt down the Infinity Stones. The Mind Stone was a gift to Loki, to help him conquer Earth. He failed, to this Thanos' displeasure. With the Aether, and the Tesseract, now both beyond his grasp, his search for the others will become even more desperate. Tell me, Fury," and suddenly his voice is deeper, booming, snarling from someplace deep. "Where is my brother's scepter?"

Fury opens his mouth, then closes it, and they all watch in astonishment as he bows his head. "I thought it was safe. My contact has been keeping me informed but I'm guessing-" His next exhale trembles a little. "I'm guessing they're gone."

Steve and Natasha bristle, and she can sense there will be words later, but for now Fury squares his shoulders. "We'll get it back."

"We have very little choice," Thor answers. "The Mind Stone must not fall into the wrong hands, HYDRA or Thanos. They reach for power beyond their ken, and when they crumble, it will be all of us that will suffer the consequences. Heimdall was able to tell me the last place he glimpsed the stone before the Bifrost closed. We must head there as soon as we are able."

* * *

Wanda once put a vision in Thor's head foretelling the destruction of his world. She remembers the echoes of crazed laughter that rose and blended into the crash of weapons, the feeling of sinking, drowning, dizzy and dead. She saw fear and she pulled it out, once, used it to control. Now, that fear had been made real. Asgard is gone, along with his love. Thor's mind is still, almost silent. It frightens her.

She sits down carefully beside him. The rickety plane they have co-opted to take them back to the States rattles all around them, drowning out her next words. "I am sorry."

"Thank you," the god says, polite and distant. He comes back to himself with the slightest of shudders and glances at her. "You are the Witch, yes? Forgive me, I cannot recall your name."

"Wanda."

"Ah. I was close," he half-smiles at her, his tone suggesting a humor he can no longer maintain. "You are the one who stopped Loki before. It was well done. I am glad to have you at our side in this fight as well, Wanda." 

"Thank you," she says. Then: "Loki, you said he...fell, as well?"

"He stayed behind to fight," Thor confirms, his voice going strangely flat. Pain ripples across the surface of his mind to wash up on the shore of hers and recedes just as quickly; Wanda doesn't follow it. Thor is ancient, and other, and his mind has always been a bit terrifying to her.

"Brave," Wanda says, trying to think about it, trying to wrap her mind around knowing it was coming. When Ultron had attacked Sokovia she had prepared, in her own way, for death. It was her country, her people, her mistakes. She would pay that price. _An eye for an eye._ It had seemed fair, and so was easier to accept. It had felt like atonement; maybe it was the same for Loki.

Thor hunches a little. "I thought the same, until Loki laughed in my face. He told me there was no point in following, or in living. That we were all doomed. Better to make his stand there than prolong the inevitable."

"Because of Thanos?"

Thor went as still as a statue, then shook his head. "Because of the Aether."

"I don't understand."

"And hopefully, you will have no need to," Thor says, tone final. "My brother has always been dramatic. And perhaps he was looking for redemption; I am ashamed to say I no longer know him as I thought I did." He pauses. " _Knew_."

This Wanda remembers well, the slow relegation of her loved ones to past tense. She places her hand on Thor's shoulder, willing - ever so slightly - a measure of peace into him. Thor relaxes slightly. "Ah, well." They both ignore the hitch in his voice. "I will remember him brave and true and loyal; wherever he may be it will annoy him to no end. For a master of lies, he was not overly fond of falsehoods." He tries on a laugh that doesn't fit him anymore; casts it away as he looks to the ground. "He was, though. Once. All of them. And Jane. So _clever_. A better family, blood or no, could not have been wished for."

Her hand presses more firmly, and he glances in her direction again. He could be telling this to Steve or Natasha, better friends to him than the girl he couldn't remember the name of, but neither of them had sat at his side. She recognizes that, the need to tell someone, to pretend for just one moment that the grief and horror is something manageable enough that you can bear speaking of it. It isn't, it never is, but the mind is a fabulous thing, with powerful tricks of persuasion sometimes.

"What would you give?" she finds herself asking before she can control herself. "To have them back."

"Most anything," Thor breathes out.

"Even..." Wanda's hand falls away. "Even us?"

Thor finally looks at her, his brow furrowing. "I will not betray you for any cause, Wanda, you have my-"

"No!" Wanda says, horrified. "That's not what I meant, I just. My brother," and she gestures at Pietro, sleeping on a pull-out bench, and remembers him waking up not two nights ago gasping, searching his body for bullet wounds that weren't there and that he didn't remember. "I don't know what I'd do," she lies.

_I'd destroy a world. I'd destroy yours. I'd tear it all down for him. For me. I **did,** and I still don't know if I could go back. Not without him._

_No more monsters,_ she'd wished, and the universe had agreed, and all the while she'd just been creating a new one out of herself to take Stark's place.

"Sacrifice is a powerful thing." Thor's voice, almost wistful, drags her out of her head. He is looking at her, and she is struck all over again at how much he has seen, how much he must know. "But life gained by death, given by another's hand - that is no life at all. It is just time, purchased with blood, and it will run out. And all I would be left with is the ashes." 

Wanda her heart feels lodged in her throat. "How do you keep _going_?"

Thor's eyes flit around the plane, to Pietro, to Natasha, to Steve, and then to the ground. "Because I must," he says, so quietly it almost goes unheard. "Jane's world did not end with her - she touched so many others. They carry her on. I hope it will be the same for me. So I cannot," he breathes deeply, and she can feel for the first time the control he has so tenuously held onto. "I cannot fight for myself, but for them. The ones who carry on. Through them, even those who die live on. It is my duty to ensure they _live_."

* * *

"I didn't want to save the world," she tells Stark. "I just wanted to save mine."

He looks at her, tired and breaking. "Well, did you?"

"No," she says, with a note of incredulity. He should know better than anyone. Unless...unless he's forgotten again. He does, sometimes, never everything, but enough, and more and more all the time. He's not yelling tonight, no tears, no armor, and it should be a relief for both of them, but she needs him. 

"I hear that. But the story's not over," Stark says. He traces his sign into the dirt again. There is more red and string to him now than flesh and bone. 

Acutely, she becomes aware that she is running out of time.

"How do I keep going?" she whispers. "How do I let go?"

"Those two questions," Stark says, finally looking up. "Have always been polar opposites to me." He looks up at the stars and sighs. "This is a very long dream. I hope FRIDAY didn't cancel my alarm again. I have things to do, things to do. Promises to keep." He hums under his breath, tuneless. Lost. She recoils into herself. "Miles to go before I sleep - ha!"

"Come back," she tells him. Pleads. There are things she needs to say, things only he can hear. "Come back to me. Stay here."

"Wanda? Wanda. What did you-" Tony shakes his head, pressing his fingers into the cracks at his temples. He looks up. "I can't. Can't come back. I'm not the one that went away."

* * *

Clint Barton meets them on the outskirts of an airfield in Georgia. Wanda feels like crying when she sees him, wants to hug him because Clint is a father and gives the best hugs, has always loved her, always had time, always said the right thing, always forgiven her sins. 'This is all my fault,' she'd told him during Ultron's attack, and he gave her the courage to get up and keep fighting. She imagines, for a moment, telling him now all the things that she's done. Maybe he'd do the same, tell her to move, fight, on your feet, Avenger-

But Clint just nods when she is introduced and his eyes slide right past her to Pietro. (Where the freeze momentarily, the line of Clint's shoulders going stiff, before he shakes his head a little and accepts whatever else Natasha whispers in his ear.)

"Glad to see you're not among the indoctrinated, Agent Barton," Fury says formally, and Clint shrugs.

"I had my go-around with mind-control. Got to say, I'm not a fan."

"Have your sources located where they've taken the scepter?"

Clint frowns. "Didn't need any sources. Haven't you seen the news?"

They all exchange glances. "We've been traveling under cover for almost two weeks now, Clint," Natasha says slowly. "What's on the news?"

He leads them to the safehouse he's set up and boots up his laptop, tabbing through some news site until he finds what he's looking for. Stark CEO Unveils New- she reads before Clint clicks on the link and the page blanks out to load a video.

 _Stark CEO Obadiah Stane Unveils New Advanced Drone,_ the headline reads. As the video loads, Wanda finds the small print.  _The new 'Knight' line of drones boasts new weaponry and armor to take on alien threat._

The video begins playing. Stane is at a podium, and Pietro grips her hand hard as his smiling face comes into focus. "I know that we've got our best men out there. On the streets, in the air, watching that portal for one wrong move. But every day letters and emails pour in, beseeching me. 'What if it's not enough?' is the question that I hear the most. Well, I'm here to give an answer to that."

The camera pans wide, and the stage lights up. "In association with Hammertech and Advanced Idea Mechanics, I bring you the leader in Stark Industries' new first line of defense." A circle slides away in the middle, and something within begins to rise. Wanda raises a shaky hand to her face, to hold back bile or a scream of both.

It's a robot, with a flat expressionless face plate, silver plated and eyes that glow blue like the hottest fire. Fully articulated, empty circles at the palms that belie some kind of power output. At the center of it's chest, covered with a glass plate and shining so fiercely it almost hurts to look at, is a bright blue circle.

It's Iron Man, built inside a broken mirror. Wanda backs away, even as Thor stiffens. "He has powered this...being with the Mind Stone. And he assumes he has control over it?"

"More like HYDRA does," Clint guesses. "And they're using up their resources before they throw them out. They've gotten everything they wanted out of Stark and AIM." 

On screen, Stane is gesturing expansively. "The boys in the lab have been calling it MODOK. Scientists always do have fun with their acronyms," he laughs charmingly. "Up top, we call him Alpha Leader. And this is his squad."

The walls behind Alpha Leader fall away, displaying at least three dozen other robots, more simplistic in their designs but just as lethal looking. Wanda is wrong; it's not Iron Man, it's _Ultron_.

Right on time, and infinitely stronger.

"Each soldier is equivalent to a human battalion," Stane brags. Someone asks him how this came to be, and he leans forward. "A breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Controllable, but smarter. Drones are all fine and well, but they don't have the precise control or the firepower that we need to take on the bigger threats."

"But are they safe?"

"Knights, arms up!" Stane calls, lifting his own arm. Around his wrist is a metal bracelet. The robots follow his motion. "And down." They move as one. "They respond to the controller's commands only, and will be deployed for only the biggest threats. You don't bring the big guns to a knife fight, after all." He smiles, and the stone in Alpha Leader's chest grows brighter, and the crowd obediently chuckles, four seconds too late. "With the Knights, we can bring peace and security to a world that increasingly feels out of control," Stane assures them, and several heads nod along.

"It's controlling them," Natasha says, hushed. "Like it manipulated us on the helicarrier."

"Infinity Stones do not have intent," Thor counters. "They are as their users. Someone must be exerting the Stone's influence."

"So what. Stane? Killian? Or is someone inside that thing?" Steve asks. He is unnaturally pale. The room reeks of fear.

"A part of someone, at least," Fury mutters, and Thor nods.

On screen, a reporter is standing. She's tall, pretty, blonde. Stane smiles at her, greets her as 'Ms. Everhart' but she doesn't even look at him, her eyes firmly fixed on the suit, wide and surprised when the rest of the crowd is wearing dazed smiles. "And," Everhart says, drifting for a moment before she gathers herself. "And where did you come up with this design, Mr. Stane?"

Stane's smile only grows, and he's almost laughing as he says "You know, this will sound kind of crazy. But it came to me in a dream."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, my MODOK is not at all similar to comics!MODOK. But bonus if you can figure out who went into that robot.


End file.
